EMILE

or
On Education
Sanabilibus aegrotamus malis; ipsaque nos in rectum genitos natura, si emendari
velimus, iuvat.
Seneca: de ira B II, c. 13 2
PREFACE

^
nr
/,
~A_HIS COLLECTION of reflections and °bseirvaidonsydisordered and almost
incoherent, was begun to gratify fljHj^HHvho knows how to think. I had at first
planned only a rnonograpff^Eafew pages. My subject drew me on in spite of myself,
and this monograph imperceptibly became a sort of opus, too big, doubtless, for
what it contains, but too small for the matter it treats. For a long time I
hesitated to publish it; and often, in working at it, it has made me aware that it
is not sufficient to have written a few pamphlets to know how to compose a book.
After vain efforts to do better, I believe I ought to present it as it is, judging
that it is important to turn public attention in this direction; and that although
my ideas may be bad, if I cause others to give birth to good ones, I shall not
entirely have wasted my time. A man, who from his retirement casts his pages out
among the public, without boosters, without a party that defends them, without even
knowing what is thought or said about them, need not fear that, if he is mistaken,
his errors will be accepted without examination.11
I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove
that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not
like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will only note that for the
longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice
without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and
the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification. A
magisterial tone fits censure; but another kind of tone—one less agreeable to
philosophic haughtiness—must be adopted in order to make proposals. In spite of so
many writings having as their end, it is said, only what is useful for the public,
the first of all useful things, the art of forming men, is still forgotten. After
Locke's book 4 my subject was still entirely fresh, and I am very much afraid that
the same will be the case after mine.
Childhood is unknown. Starting from the false ideaone has of it, the farther one
goes, the more one loses one's way. The wisest men con-

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centrate on what it is important for men to know without considering what children
are in a condition to learn. They are always seeking the man in the child without
thinking of what he is before being a man. This is the study to which I have most
applied myself, so that even though my entire method were chimerical and false, my
observations could still be of profit. My vision of what must be done may have been
very poor, but I believe I have seen clearly the subject on which one must work.
Begin, then, by studying your pupils better. For most assuredly you do not know
them at all. Now if you read this book with this in view, I believe it will not be
without utility for you.
As to what will be called the systematic part, which is here nothing but the march
of nature, it is the point that will most put the reader off, and doubtless it is
here that I will be attacked. And perhaps it will not be wrong to do so. It will be
believed that what is being read is less an educational treatise than a visionary's
dreams about education. What is to be done about it? It is on the basis not of
others' ideas that I write but on that of my own. I do not see as do other men. I
have long been reproached for that. But is it up to me to provide myself with other
eyes or to affect other ideas? No. It is up to me not to go overboard, not to
believe that I alone am wiser than everybody. It is up to me not to change
sentiments but to distrust mine. That is all I can do; and that is what I do. If I
sometimes adopt an assertive tone, it is not for the sake of making an impression
on the reader but for the sake of speaking to him as I think. Why should I propose
as doubtful what, so far as I am concerned, I do not doubt at all? I say exactly
what goes on in my mind/
Iii expounding freely my sentiment, I so little expect that it be taken as
authoritative that I always join to it my reasons, so that they may be weighed and
I be judged. But although I do not wish to be obstinate in defending my ideas, I
nonetheless believe that it is my obligation to propose them; for the maxims ■"•
concerning which I am of an opinion different from that of others are not matters
of indifference. They are among those whose truth or falsehood is important to know
and which make the happiness or the unhappiness of mankind.
"Propose what can be done," they never stop repeating to me. It is as if I were
told, "Propose doing what is done," or at least, "Propose some good which can be
allied with the existing evil." Such a project, in certain matters, is much more
chimerical than mine. For in this alliance the good is spoiled, and the evil is not
cured. I would prefer to follow the established practice in everything than to
follow a good one halfway. There would be less contradiction in man. He cannot
pursue two opposite goals at the same time. Fathers and mothers, what can be done
is what you want to do. Ought I to be responsible for your will?
In every sort of project there are two things to consider: first, the absolute
goodness of the project; in the second place, the facility of execution.
In the first respect it suffices that the project be acceptable and practicable in
itself, that what is good in it be in the nature of the thing; here, for example,
that the proposed education be suitable for man and well adapted to the human
heart.
[34]
PREFACE
The second consideration depends on relations given in certain situations—relations
accidental to the thing, which consequently are not necessary and admit of infinite
variety. Thus, one education may be practicable in Switzerland and not in France;
one may be for the bourgeois, and another for the noble. The greater or lesser
facility of execution depends on countless circumstances that are impossible to
determine otherwise than in a particular application of the method to this or that
country, to this or that station. Now all these particular applications, not being
essential to my subject, do not enter into my plan. Other men will be able to
concern themselves with them, if they wish, each for the country or estate he may
have in view. It is enough for me that wherever men are born, what I propose can be
done with them; and that, having done with them what I propose, what is best both
for themselves and for others will have been done. If I do not fulfill this
engagement, I am doubtless wrong. But if I do fulfill it, it would also be wrong to
exact more from me. For that is all I promise.
EMILE
Explanation of the Illustrationsu
I. The illustration, which relates to the first book and serves as frontispiece
to the work, represents Thetis plunging her son in the Styx to make him
invulnerable. (See Frontispiece.)
II. The illustration at the beginning of the second book represents Chiron
training the little Achilles in running. (See p. 76.)
III. The illustration at the beginning of the third book and the second volume7
represents Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns. (See p. 164.)
IV. The illustration which belongs to the fourth book and is at the beginning
of the third volume represents Orpheus teaching men the worship of the gods. (See
p. 261.)
V. The illustration at the beginning of the fifth book and the fourth volume
represents Circe giving herself to Ulysses, whom she was not able to transform.
(See p. 356.)
[36]
BOOK I
F
J,___A VERYTHING is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of
things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish
the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and
confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse,
his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves
deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man
must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his
fancy like a tree in his garden.
Were he not to do this, however, everything would go even worse, and our species
does not admit of being formed halfway. In the present state of things a man
abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth would be the most
disfigured of all. Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, all the social
institutions in which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and
put nothing in its place. Nature there would be like a shrub that chance had caused
to be born in the middle of a path and that the passers-by soon cause to perish by
bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction.
It is to you that I address myself, tender and foresighted mother,* 1
* The first education is the most important, and this first education belongs
incontestably to women; if the Author of nature had wanted it to belong to men, He
would have given them milk with which to nurse the children. Always speak, then,
preferably to women in your treatises on education; for, beyond the fact that they
are in a position to watch over it more closely than are men and always have
greater influence on it, they also have much more interest in its success, since
most widows find themselves almost at the mercy of their children; then their
children make mothers keenly aware, for good or ill, of the effect of the way they
raised their children. The laws—always so occupied with property and so little with
persons, because their object is peace not virtue—do not give enough authority to
mothers. However, their status is more certain than that of fathers; their duties
are more painful; their cares are more important for the good order of the family;
generally they are more attached to the children. There are occasions on which a
son who lacks respect for his father can in some way be excused. But if on any
occasion whatsoever a child were unnatural enough to lack respect for his mother—
for her who carried him in her womb, who nursed him with her milk, who for years
forgot herself in favor
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who are capable of keeping the nascent shrub away from the highway and securing it
from the impact of human opinions! Cultivate and water the young plant before it
dies. Its fruits will one day be your delights. Form an enclosure around your
child's soul at an early date. Someone else can draw its circumference, but you
alone must build the fence.
Plants are shaped by cultivation, and men by education. If man were born big and
strong, his size and strength would be useless to him until he had learned to make
use of them. They would be detrimental to him in that they would keep others from
thinking of aiding him.* And, abandoned to himself, he would die of want before
knowing his needs. And childhood is taken to be a pitiable state! It is not seen
that the human race would have perished if man had not begun as a child.
We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we
are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which
we need when we are grown is given us by education.
This education comes to us from nature or from men or from things. The internal
development of our faculties and our organs is the education of nature. The use
that we are taught to make of this development is the education of men. And what we
acquire from our own experience about the objects which affect us is the education
of things.
Each of us is thus formed by three kinds of masters. The disciple in whom their
various lessons are at odds with one another is badly raised and will never be in
agreement with himself. He alone in whom they all coincide at the same points and
tend to the same ends reaches his goal and lives consistently. He alone is well
raised.
Now, of these three different educations, the one coming from nature is in no way
in our control; that coming from things is in our control only in certain respects;
that coming from men is the only one of which we are truly the masters. Even of it
we are the masters only by hypothesis. For who can hope entirely to direct the
speeches and the deeds of all those surrounding a child?
Therefore, when education becomes an art, it is almost impossible for it to
succeed, since the conjunction of the elements necessary to its success is in no
one's control. All that one can do by dint of care is to come more or less close to
the goal, but to reach it requires luck.
What is that goal? It is the very same as that of nature. This has just been
proved. Since the conjunction of the three educations is necessary
of caring for him alone—one should hasten to strangle this wretch as a monster
unworthy of seeing the light of day. Mothers, it is said, spoil their children. In
that they are doubtless wrong—but less wrong than you perhaps who deprave them. The
mother wants her child to be happy, happy now. In that she is right. When she is
mistaken about the means, she must be enlightened. Fathers' ambition, avarice,
tyranny, and false foresight, their negligence, their harsh insensitivity are a
hundred times more disastrous for children than is the blind tenderness of mothers.
Moreover, the sense I give to the name mother must be explained; and that is what
will be done hereafter.
* Similar to them on the outside and deprived of speech as well as of the ideas it
expresses, he would not be in a condition to make them understand the need he had
of their help, and nothing in him would manifest this need to them.
[38]
BOOK I
to their perfection, the two others must be directed toward the one over which we
have no power. But perhaps this word nature has too vague a sense. An attempt must
be made here to settle on its meaning.
Nature, we are told, is only habit. What does that mean? Are there not habits
contracted only by force which never do stifle nature? Such, for example, is the
habit of the plants whose vertical direction is interfered with. The plant, set
free, keeps the inclination it was forced to take. But the sap has not as a result
changed its original direction; and if the plant continues to grow, its new growth
resumes the vertical direction. The case is the same for men's inclinations. So
long as one remains in the same condition, the inclinations which result from habit
and are the least natural to us can be kept; but as soon as the situation changes,
habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only habit. Now are
there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? Where
does this difference come from? If the name nature were limited to habits
conformable to nature, we would spare ourselves this garble.
We are born with the use of our senses, and from our birth we are affected in
various ways by the objects surrounding us. As soon as we have, so to speak,
consciousness of our sensations, we are disposed to seek or avoid the objects which
produce them, at first according to whether they are pleasant or unpleasant to us,
then according to the conformity or lack of it that we find between us and these
objects, and finally according to the judgments we make about them on the basis of
the idea of happiness or of perfection given us by reason. These dispositions are
extended and strengthened as we become more capable of using our senses and more
enlightened; but constrained by our habits, they are more or less corrupted by our
opinions. Before this corruption they are what I call in us nature.
It is, then, to these original dispositions that everything must be related; and
that could be done if our three educations were only different from one another.
But what is to be done when they are opposed? When, instead of raising a man for
himself, one wants to raise him for others? Then their harmony is impossible.
Forced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making
a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.
Every particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is estranged from the all-
encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They are only men. They
are nothing in his eyes.- This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling. The
essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the
Spartan was ambitious, avaricious, iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and
concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great
length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them.
A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.
Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the absolute whole
which is relative only to itself or its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity
dependent on the denominator; his value is deter-
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mined by his relation to the whole, which is the social body. Good social
institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute
existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the
common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one
but a part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole. A citizen of
Rome was neither Caius nor Lucius; he was a Roman. He even loved the country
exclusive of himself. Regulus claimed he was Carthaginian on the grounds that he
had become the property of his masters. In his status of foreigner he refused to
sit in the Roman senate; a Carthaginian had to order him to do so. He was indignant
that they wanted to save his life. He conquered and returned triumphant to die by
torture. This has little relation, it seems to me, to the men we know.'1
The Lacedaemonian Pedaretus runs for the council of three hundred. He is defeated.
He goes home delighted that there were three hundred men worthier than he to be
found in Sparta. I take this display to be sincere, and there is reason to believe
that it was. This is the citizen."
A Spartan woman had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. A
Helot arrives; trembling, she asks him for news. "Your five sons were killed."
"Base slave, did I ask you that?" "We won the victory." The mother runs to the
temple and gives thanks to the gods. This is the female citizen.5
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature
does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating
between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He
will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our
days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois." He will be nothing.
To be something, to be oneself and always one, a man must act as he speaks; he must
always be decisive in making his choice, make it in a lofty style, and always stick
to it. I am waiting to be shown this marvel so as to know whether he is a man or a
citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time.
From these necessarily opposed objects come two contrary forms of instruction—the
one, public and common; the other, individual and domestic.
Do you want to get an idea of public education? Read Plato's Republic. It is not at
all a political work, as think those who judge books only by their titles. It is
the most beautiful educational treatise ever written.
When one wishes to refer to the land of chimeras, mention is made of Plato's
institutions. If Lycurgus had set his down only in writing, I would find them far
more chimerical. Plato only purified the heart of man; Lycurgus denatured it.7
Public instruction no longer exists and can no longer exist, because where there is
no longer fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland
and citizen, should be effaced from modern languages. I know well the reason why
this is so, but I do not want to tell it. It has nothing to do with my subject.*
I do not envisage as a public education those laughable establish-
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BOOK I
ments called colleges* '■' Nor do I count the education of society, because this
education, tending to two contrary ends, fails to attain either. It is fit only for
making double men, always appearing to relate everything to others and never
relating anything except to themselves alone. Now since these displays are common
to everyone, no one is taken in by them. They are so much wasted effort.
From these contradictions is born the one we constantly experience within
ourselves. Swept along in contrary routes by nature and by men, forced to divide
ourselves between these different impulses, we follow a composite impulse which
leads us to neither one goal nor the other. Thus, in conflict and floating during
the whole course of our life, we end it without having been able to put ourselves
in harmony with ourselves and without having been good either for ourselves or for
others.
There remains, finally, domestic education or the education of nature. But what
will a man raised uniquely for himself become for others? If perchance the double
object we set for ourselves could be joined in a single one by removing the
contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed. In order
to judge of this, he would have to be seen wholly formed: his inclinations would
have to have been observed, his progress seen, his development followed. In a word,
the natural man would have to be known. I believe that one will have made a few
steps in these researches when one has read this writing.
To form this rare man, what do we have to do? Very much, doubtless. What must be
done is to prevent anything from being done. When it is only a question of going
against the wind, one tacks. But if the sea is heavy and one wants to stand still,
one must cast anchor. Take care, young pilot, for fear that your cable run or your
anchor drag and that the vessel drift without your noticing.
In the social order where all positions are determined, each man ought to be raised
for his. If an individual formed for his position leaves it, he is no longer fit
for anything. Education is useful only insofar as fortune is in agreement with the
parents' vocation. In any other case it is harmful to the student, if only by
virtue of the prejudices it gives him. In Egypt where the son was obliged to
embrace the station of his father, education at least had a sure goal. But among us
where only the ranks remain and the men who compose them change constantly, no one
knows whether in raising his son for his rank he is not working against him.
In the natural order, since men are all equal, their common calling is man's estate
and whoever is well raised for that calling cannot fail to fulfill those callings
related to it. Let my student be destined for the sword, the church, the bar. I do
not care. Prior to the calling of his parents is nature's call to human life.
Living is the job I want to teach him. On leaving my hands, he will, I admit, be
neither magistrate nor
* There are in the academy of Geneva and the University of Paris professors whom I
like very much and believe to be very capable of instructing the young well, if
they were not forced to follow the established practice. I exhort one among them to
publish the project of reform which he has conceived. Perhaps, when it is seen that
the ill is not without remedy, there will be a temptation to cure it.
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soldier nor priest. He will, in the first place, be a man. All that a man should
be, he will in case of need know how to be as well as anyone; and fortune may try
as it may to make him change place, he will always be in his own place. Occupavi te
fortuna atque cepi omnesque aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses.*
Our true study is that of the human condition. He among us who best knows how to
bear the goods and the ills of this life is to my taste the best raised: from which
it follows that the true education consists less in precept than in practice. We
begin to instruct ourselves when we begin to live. Our education begins with us.
Our first preceptor is our nurse. Thus this word education had another meaning for
the ancients which we no longer give to it. Educit obstetrix, says Varro, educat
nutrix, instituit pedagogus, docet magister.t
Thus education, instruction, and teaching are three things as different in their
object as are the governess, the preceptor, and the master. But these distinctions
are ill drawn; and, to be well led, the child should follow only a single guide.
We must, then, generalize our views and consider in our pupil abstract man, man
exposed to all the accidents of human life. If men were born attached to a
country's soil, if the same season lasted the whole year, if each man were fixed in
his fortune in such a way as never to be able to change it—the established practice
would be good in certain respects. The child raised for his station, never leaving
it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of
human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets
everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than
raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going
to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step
on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him
to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it.
One thinks only of preserving one's child. That is not enough. One ought to teach
him to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and
poverty, to live, if he has to, in freezing Iceland or on Malta's burning rocks.
You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to
die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts
would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of
making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our
organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the
sentiment of our existence.12 The man who has lived the most is not he who has
counted the most years but he who has most felt life. Men have been buried at one
hundred who died at their birth. They would have gained from dying young; at least
they would have lived up to that time.
All our wisdom consists in servile prejudices. All our practices are only
subjection, impediment, and constraint. Civil man is born, lives, and dies in
slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at his
* Tuscul. V.M t Non. Marcell.11
[42]
BOOK I
death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he keeps his human shape, he is
enchained by our institutions.
It is said that many midwives claim that by kneading newborn babies' heads, they
give them a more suitable shape. And this is tolerated! Our heads are ill fashioned
by the Author of our being! We need to have them fashioned on the outside by
midwives and on the inside by philosophers. The Caribs are twice as lucky as we
are.
Hardly has the baby emerged from the mother's womb, and hardly has he enjoyed the
freedom to move and stretch his limbs before he is given new bonds. He is swaddled,
laid out with the head secured and the legs stretched out, the arms hanging beside
the body. He is surrounded with linens and trusses of every kind which do not
permit him to change position, and he is lucky if he has not been squeezed to the
point of being prevented from breathing and if care was taken to lay him on his
side in order that the waters that should come out of his mouth can fall by
themselves, for he would not have the freedom of turning his head to the side to
facilitate the flow. *
The newborn baby needs to stretch and move its limbs in order to arouse them from
the torpor in which, drawn up in a little ball, they have for so long remained.
They are stretched out, it is true, but they are prevented from moving. Even the
head is subjected to caps. It seems that we are afraid lest he appear to be alive.
Thus, the impulse of the internal parts of a body which tends to growth finds an
insurmountable obstacle to the movements that impulse asks of the body. The baby
constantly makes useless efforts which exhaust its forces or retard their progress.
He was less cramped, less constrained, less compressed in the amnion than he is in
his diapers. I do not see what he gained by being born.
The inaction, the constraint in which a baby's limbs are kept can only hinder the
circulation of the blood, of the humors, prevent the baby from fortifying himself,
from growing, and cause his constitution to degenerate. In the places where these
extravagant precautions are not taken, men are all tall, strong, and well
proportioned.! The countries where children are swaddled teem with hunchbacks,
cripples, men with stunted or withered limbs, men suffering from rickets, men
misshapen in every way. For fear that bodies be deformed by free movements, we
hurry to deform the children by putting them into a press. We would gladly cripple
them to keep them from laming themselves.
Could not so cruel a constraint have an influence on their disposition as well as
on their constitution? Their first sentiment is a sentiment of pain and suffering.
They find only obstacles to all the movements which they need. Unhappier than a
criminal in irons, they make vain efforts. they get irritable, they cry. Their
first voices, you say, are tears. I can well believe it. You thwart them from their
birth. The first gifts they receive from you are chains. The first treatment they
experience is
* Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, vol. IV, p. 190.,3 t See note J on page 60.
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EMILE
torment. Having nothing free but the voice, how would they not make use of it to
complain? They cry because you are hurting them. Thus garroted, you would cry
harder than they do.
Where does this unreasonable practice come from? From a denatured practice. Since
mothers, despising their first duty, have no longer wanted to feed their children,
it has been necessary to confide them to mercenary women who, thus finding
themselves mothers of alien children on whose behalf nature tells them nothing,
have sought only to save themselves effort. It would be necessary to be constantly
watchful over a child in freedom. But when it is well bound, one throws it in a
corner without being troubled by its cries. Provided that there be no proofs of
negligence on the part of the nurse, provided that her charge does not break an arm
or a leg, beyond that what difference does it make that he wastes away or remains
infirm for the rest of his days? His limbs are preserved at the expense of his
body, and, whatever happens, the nurse is exonerated.
Do they know, these gentle mothers who, delivered from their children, devote
themselves gaily to the entertainments of the city, what kind of treatment the
swaddled child is getting in the meantime in the village? At the slightest trouble
that arises he is hung from a nail like a sack of clothes, and while the nurse
looks after her business without hurrying, the unfortunate stays thus crucified.
All those found in this position had violet faces. The chest was powerfully
compressed, blocking circulation, and the blood rose to the head. The sufferer was
believed to be quite tranquil, because he did not have the strength to cry. I do
not know how many hours a child can remain in this condition without losing its
life, but I doubt that this can go on very long. This is, I think, one of the great
advantages of swaddling.
It is claimed that children in freedom could assume bad positions and make
movements capable of hurting the good conformation of their limbs. This is one of
those vain reasonings of our false wisdom that has never been confirmed by any
experience. Of that multitude of children who, among peoples more sensible than us,
are reared with complete freedom of their limbs, not a single one is seen who
wounds or cripples himself. They could not give their movements sufficient force to
make them dangerous; and, when they take a strained position, the pain soon warns
them to change it.
We have not yet taken it into our heads to swaddle little dogs or cats. Do we see
that they have any problems as a result of this negligence? Children are heavier.
Agreed. But they are also proportionately weaker. They can hardly move. How would
they cripple themselves? If they were stretched out on their backs, they would die
in this position, like the tortoise, without ever being able to turn themselves
over.
Not satisfied with having given up nursing their children, women give up wanting to
have them. The result is natural. As soon as the condition of motherhood becomes
burdensome, the means to deliver oneself from it completely is soon found. They
want to perform a useless act so as always to be able to start over again, and they
turn to the prejudice of the species the attraction given for the sake of
multiplying it. This practice, added to the other causes of depopulation, presages
the
[44]
BOOK I
impending fate of Europe. The sciences, the arts, the philosophy, and the morals
that this practice engenders will not be long in making a desert of it. It will be
peopled with ferocious beasts. The change of inhabitants will not be great.
I have sometimes seen the little trick of young women who feign to want to nurse
their children. They know how to have pressure put on them to give up this whim.
Husbands, doctors, especially mothers, are adroitly made to intervene. A husband
who dared to consent to his wife's nursing her child would be a man lost. He would
be made into a murderer who wants to get rid of her. Prudent husbands, paternal
love must be immolated for the sake of peace; you are fortunate that women more
continent than yours can be found in the country, more fortunate yet if the time
your wives save is not destined for others than you!
There is no question about the duty of women. But there is dispute as to whether,
given the contempt they have for it, it makes any difference for the children to be
nursed with the mother's milk or that of another. Let me take this question, of
which the doctors are the judges,'' to be decided just as the women would like. For
my part I, too, certainly think that it is preferable for a child to suck the milk
of a healthy nurse than of a spoiled mother, if he had some new ill to fear from
the same blood out of which he was formed.
But should the question be envisaged only from the physical side, and does the
child have less need of a mother's care than of her breast? Other women, even
beasts, will be able to give him the milk that she refuses him. There is no
substitute for maternal solicitude. She who nurses another's child in place of her
own is a bad mother. How will she be a good nurse? She could become one, but
slowly; habit would have to change nature; and the child, ill cared for, will have
the time to perish a hundred times before his nurse has gained a mother's
tenderness for him.
From this very advantage results a drawback which alone should take from every
sensitive woman the courage to have her child nursed by another. The drawback is
that of sharing a mother's right, or rather of alienating it, of seeing her child
love another woman as much as and more than her, of feeling that the tenderness
that he preserves for his own mother is a favor and that the tenderness he has for
his adoptive mother is a duty. Where I found a mother's care do not I owe a son's
attachment?
Their way of remedying this drawback is to inspire contempt in the children for
their nurses by treating them as veritable servants. When their service is
completed, the child is taken back or the nurse dismissed. By dint of giving her a
poor reception, she is discouraged from coming to see her charge. At the end of a
few years he no longer sees her, no longer knows her. The mother who believes she
replaces the nurse and makes up for her neglect by her cruelty is mistaken. Instead
of making a tender son out of a denatured nursling, she trains him in ingratitude,
she teaches him one day to despise her who gave him life as well as her who nursed
him with her milk.
How I would insist on this point were it not so discouraging to keep
[45]
EMILK
raising useful subjects in vaint More depends on this one than is
f thought. *D0 you wish to Brlfig everyone back to his first duties? Begin
with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce.
Everything follows successively from this first depravity. The whole '
moral order degenerates; naturalness is extinguished in all hearts;
home life takes on a less lively aspect; the touching spectacle of a
if family aborning no longer attaches husbands, no longer imposes respect
' on outsiders; the mother whose children one does not see is less re-
spectedJOne does not reside in one's family; habit does not strengthen
the Mood ties. There are no longer fathers, mothers, children, brothers,
or sisters. They all hardly know each other. How could they love each
other? Each thinks only of himself. When home is only a sad solitude,
onemust surely go elsewhere Jpji.gaAeJtj;.
J^But letmothers*Uelf*n to nurse their cHirafel;*rfiOrals will refornf
t"themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the
| state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring^
{everything back together. TJje^ attraction qf„dojoiestic life is the besg,
ftounleTl«^ff^r^aWlft#ras. The Bolher of children, which is believed
to be an importunity, becomes pleasant. It makes the father and mother
more necessary, dearer to one another; it tightens the conjugal bond
between them. When the family is lively and animated, the domestic
cares constitute the dearest occupation of the wife and the sweetest
enjoyment of the husband. Thus, from the correction of this single
abuse would soon result a general reform; nature would soon have
reclaimed all its rights. Let women once again become mothers, men
will soon become fathers and husbands again.
Superfluous speeches! The very boredom of worldly pleasures never leads back to
these. Women have stopped being mothers; they will no longer be; they no longer
want to be. If they should want to be, they hardly could be. Today the contrary
practice is established. Each one would have to combat the opposition of every
woman who comes near her, all in league against an example that some did not give
and the rest do not want to follow.
There are, nevertheless, still sometimes young persons of a good nature who on this
point, daring to brave the empire of fashion and the clamors of their sex, fulfill
with a virtuous intrepidity this duty so sweet imposed on them by nature. May their
number increase as a result of the attraction of the goods destined for those who
devote themselves to it! Founded on conclusions given by the simplest reasoning and
on observations that I have never seen belied, I dare to promise these worthy
mothers a solid and constant attachment on the part of their husbands, a truly
filial tenderness on the part of their children, the esteem and respect of the
public, easy deliveries without mishap and without aftermath, a firm and vigorous
health; finally the pleasure of seeing themselves one day imitated by their own
daughters and cited as examples to others' daughters.
No mother, no child. Between them the duties are reciprocal, and if they are ill
fulfilled on one side, they will be neglected on the other. The child ought to love
his mother before knowing that he ought to. If the voice of blood is not
strengthened by habit and care, it is extin-
[46]
l#«k I
guished in the first years, and the heart dies, so to speak, before being born.
Here we are, from the first steps, outside of nature.
One leaves it by an opposite route as well when, instead of neglecting a mother's
care, a woman carries it to excess; when she makes an idol of her child; when she
increases and nurses his weakness in order to prevent him from feeling it; and
when, hoping to exempt him from the laws of nature, she keeps hard blows away from
him. She preserves him for a moment from a few discomforts without thinking about
how many mishaps and perils she is thereby accumulating for him to bear later, and
how barbarous a precaution it is which adds childhood's weakness to mature men's
toils. Thetis, to make her son invulnerable, plunged him, according to the fable,
in the water of the Styx.14 This allegory is a lovely one, and it is clear. The
cruel mothers of whom I speak do otherwise: by dint of plunging their children in
softness, they prepare them for suffering; they open their pores to ills of every
sort to which they will not fail to be prey when grown.
Observe nature and follow the path it maps out for you. It exercises children
constantly; it hardens their temperament by tests of all sorts; it teaches them
early what effort and pain are. Teething puts them in a fever; sharp colics give
them convulsions; long coughs suffocate them; worms torment them; plethora corrupts
their blood; various leavens ferment in it and cause perilous eruptions. Almost all
the first age is sickness and danger. Half the children born perish before the
eighth year. The tests passed, the child has gained strength; and as soon as he can
make use of life, its principle becomes sounder.
That is nature's rule. Why do you oppose it? Do you not see that in thinking you
correct it, you destroy its product, you impede the effect of its care? To do on
the outside what nature does on the inside redoubles the danger, according to you;
and, on the contrary, this diverts the danger and weakens it. Experience teaches
that even more children raised delicately die than do others. Provided the limit of
their strength is not exceeded, less is risked in employing that strength than in
sparing it. Exercise them, then, against the attacks they will one day have to
bear. Harden their bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements;
against hunger, thirst, fatigue. Steep them in the water of the Styx. Before the
body's habit is acquired, one can give it the habit one wants to give it without
danger. But when it has once gained its consistency, every alteration becomes
perilous for it. A child will bear changes that a man would not bear; the fibers of
the former, soft and flexible, take without effort the turn that they are given;
those of the man, more hardened, change only with violence the turn they have
received. A child, then, can be made robust without exposing its life and its
health; and if there were some risk, still one must not hesitate. Since these are
risks inseparable from human life, can one do better than shift them to that part
of its span when they are least disadvantageous?
A child becomes more precious as he advances in age. To the value of his person is
joined that of the effort he has cost; to the loss of his life is joined in him the
sentiment of death. It is, then, especially of the future that one must think in
looking after his preservation. It is against the ills of youth that he must be
armed before he reaches them; for
[47]
EMIHB
if the value of life increases up to the age of making use of it, what folly is it
not to spare childhood some ills while multiplying them for the age of reason? Are
those the lessons of the master?
The fate of man is to suffer at all times. The very care of his preservation is
connected with pain. Lucky to know only physical ills in his childhood—ills far
less cruel, far less painful than are the other kinds of ills and which far more
rarely make us renounce life than do the others! One does not kill oneself for the
pains of gout. There are hardly any but those of the soul which produce despair. We
pity the lot of childhood, and it is our own that should be pitied. Our greatest
ills come to us from ourselves.
A child cries at birth; the first part of his childhood is spent crying. At one
time we bustle about, we caress him in order to pacify him; at another, we threaten
him, we strike him in order to make him keep quiet. Either we do what pleases him,
or we exact from him what pleases us. Either we submit to his whims, or we submit
him to ours. No middle ground; he must give orders or receive them. Thus his first
ideas are those of domination and servitude. Before knowing how to speak, he
commands; before being able to act, he obeys. And sometimes he is chastised before
he is able to know his offenses or, rather, to commit any. It is thus that we fill
up his young heart at the outset with the passions which later we impute to nature
and that, after having taken efforts to make him wicked, we complain about finding
him so.
A child spends six or seven years thus in the hands of women, victim of their
caprice and of his own. And after having made him learn this and that—that is,
after having burdened his memory either with words he cannot understand or with
things that are good for nothing to him; after having stifled his nature by
passions that one has caused to be born in him—this factitious being is put in the
hands of a preceptor who completes the development of the artificial seeds that he
finds already all formed and teaches him everything, except to know himself, except
to take advantage of himself, except to know how to live and to make himself happy.
Finally when this child, slave and tyrant, full of science and bereft of sense,
frail in body and soul alike, is cast out into the world, showing there his
ineptitude, his pride, and all his vices, he becomes the basis for our deploring
human misery and perversity. This is a mistake. He is the man of our whims; the man
of nature is differently constituted.
Do you, then, want him to keep his original form? Preserve it from the instant he
comes into the world. As soon as he is born, take hold of him and leave him no more
before he is a man. You will never succeed without that. As the true nurse is the
mother, the true preceptor is the father. Let them be in agreement both about the
order of their functions and about their system; let the child pass from the hands
of the one into those of the other. He will be better raised by a judicious and
limited father than the cleverest master in the world; for zeal will make up for
talent better than talent for zeal.
But business, offices, duties . . . Ah, duties! Doubtless the least is
[48]
BOOK I
that of father? * Let us not be surprised that a man whose wife did not deign to
nurse the fruit of their union does not deign to raise him. There is no picture
more charming than that of the family, but a single missing feature disfigures all
the others. If the mother has too little health to be nurse, the father will have
too much business to be preceptor. The children, sent away, dispersed in boarding
schools, convents, colleges, will take the love belonging to the paternal home
elsewhere, or to put it better, they will bring back to the paternal home the habit
of having no attachments. Brothers and sisters will hardly know one another. When
all are gathered together for ceremonial occasions, they will be able to be quite
polite with one another. They will treat one another as strangers. As soon as there
is no more intimacy between the parents, as soon as the society of the family no
longer constitutes the sweetness of life, it is of course necessary to turn to bad
morals to find a substitute. Where is the man stupid enough not to see the chain
formed by all these links?
A father, when he engenders and feeds children, does with that only a third of his
task. He owes to his species men; he owes to society sociable men; he owes to the
state citizens. Every man who can pay this triple debt and does not do so is
culpable, and more culpable perhaps when he pays it halfway. He who cannot fulfill
the duties of a father has no right to become one. Neither poverty nor labors nor
concern for public opinion exempts him from feeding his children and from raising
them himself. Readers, you can believe me. I predict to whoever has vitals and
neglects such holy duties that he will long shed bitter tears for his offense and
will never find consolation for it.16
But what does this rich man—this father of a family, so busy, and forced, according
to him, to leave his children uncared for—do? He pays another man to take
responsibility for these cares which are a burden to him. Venal soul! Do you
believe that you are with money giving your son another father? Make no mistake
about it; what you are giving him is not even a master but a valet. This first
valet will soon make a second one out of your son.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the qualities of a good governor. The
first quality I would exact of him, and this one alone presupposes many others, is
that he not be a man for sale. There are callings so noble that one cannot follow
them for money without proving oneself unworthy of following them. Such is that of
the man of war; such is that of the teacher. "Who then will raise my child?" I
already told you: you, yourself. "I cannot." You cannot! . . . Find yourself a
friend then. I see no other solution.
A governor! O what a sublime soul ... in truth, to make a man,
* When one reads in Plutarch that Cato the Censor, who governed Rome so gloriously,
himself raised his son from the cradle and with such care that he left everything
to be present when the nurse—that is to say, the mother—changed and bathed him;
when one reads in Suetonius that Augustus, master of the world that he had
conquered and that he himself ruled, himself taught his grandsons to write, to
swim, the elements of the sciences, and that he had them constantly around him—one
cannot keep from laughing at the good little people of those times who enjoyed
themselves in the like foolishness, doubtless too limited to know how to mind the
great business of the great men of our days.1"'
[49]
EMILE
one must be either a father or more than a man oneself.17 That is the function you
calmly confide to mercenaries.
The more one thinks about it, the more one perceives new difficulties. It would be
necessary that the governor had been raised for his pupil, that the pupil's
domestics had been raised for their master, that all those who have contact with
him had received the impressions that they ought to communicate to him. It would be
necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it
possible that a child be well raised by one who was not well raised himself?
Is this rare mortal not to be found? I do not know. In these degraded times who
knows to what point of virtue a human soul can still attain? But let us suppose
this marvel found. It is in considering what he ought to do that we shall see what
he ought to be. What I believe I see in advance is that a father who sensed all the
value of a good governor would decide to do without one, for he would expend more
effort in acquiring him than in becoming one himself. Does he then want to find a
friend? Let him raise his son to be one. Thus, he is spared seeking for him
elsewhere, and nature has already done half the work.
Someone of whom I know only the rank had the proposal to raise his son conveyed to
me. He doubtless did me a great deal of honor; but far from complaining about my
refusal, he ought to congratulate himself on my discretion. If I had accepted his
offer and my method were mistaken, the education would have been a failure. If I
had succeeded, it would have been far worse. His son would have repudiated his
title; he would no longer have wished to be a prince. /lam too impressed by the
greatness of a preceptor's duties, I feel my incapacity too much ever to accept
such employment from whatever quarter it might be offered to me, and the interest
of friendship itself would be but a further motive for refusal. I believe that
after having read this book, few people will be tempted to make me this offer, and
I beg those who might be, not to make this useless effort any more. In the past I
made a sufficient trial of this calling to be certain that I am not proper for
it,,s and my condition would excuse me from it if my talents made me capable of it.
I believed I owed this public declaration to those who appear not to accord me
enough esteem to believe me sincere and well founded in my resolutions^
Not in a condition to fulfill the most useful task, I will dare at least to attempt
the easier one; following the example of so many others, I shall put my hand not to
the work but to the pen; and instead of doing what is necessary, I shall endeavor
to say it.
I know that in undertakings like this one, an author—always comfortable with
systems that he is not responsible for putting into practice—may insouciantly offer
many fine precepts which are impossible to follow. And in the absence of details
and examples, even the feasible things he says, if he has not shown their
application, remain ineffectual.
I have hence chosen to give myself an imaginary pupil, to hypothesize that I have
the age, health, kinds of knowledge, and all the talent suitable for working at his
education, for conducting him from the moment of his birth up to the one when,
become a grown man, he will no longer have need of any guide other than himself.
This method ap-
[50]
BOOK I
pears to me useful to prevent an author who distrusts himself from getting lost in
visions; for when he deviates from ordinary practice, he has only to make a test of
his own practice on his pupil. He will soon sense, or the reader will sense for
him, whether he follows the progress of childhood and the movement natural to the
human heart.
This is what I have tried to do in all the difficulties which have arisen. In order
not to fatten the book uselessly, I have been content with setting down the
principles whose truth everyone should sense. But as for the rules which might need
proofs, I have applied them all to my Emile or to other examples; and I have shown
in very extensive detail how what I have established could be put into practice.
Such at least is the plan that I have proposed to follow. It is up to the reader to
judge if I have succeeded.
The result of this procedure is that at first I have spoken little of my Emile,
because my first educational maxims,'^ although contrary to those which are
established, are so evident that it is difficult for any reasonable man to refuse
his consent to them. But in the measure I advance, my pupil, differently conducted
than yours, is no longer an ordinary child. He requires a way of life special to
him. Then he appears more frequently on the scene, and toward the last times I no
longer let him out of sight for a moment until, whatever he may say, he has no
longer the least need of me.
I do not speak at all here of a good governor's qualities; I take them for granted,
and I take for granted that I myself am endowed with all these qualities. In
reading this work, one will see with what liberality I treat myself.
I shall only remark that, contrary to common opinion, a child's governor ought to
be young and even as young as a wise man can be. I would want him to be a child
himself if it were possible, to be able to become his pupil's companion and attract
his confidence by sharing his enjoyments. There are not enough things in common
between childhood and maturity for a really solid attachment ever to be formed at
this distance. Children sometimes flatter old men, but they never love them.
One would wish that the governor had already educated someone. That is too much to
wish for; the same man can only give one education. If two were required in order
to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first?
With more experience one would know how to do better, but one would no longer be
able to. Whoever has once fulfilled this function well enough to sense all its
difficulties does not attempt to engage himself in it again; and if he has
fulfilled it poorly the first time, that is an unfavorable augury for the second.
It is quite different, I agree, to follow a young man for four years than to lead
him for twenty-five. You give a governor to your son after he is already all
formed; as for me, I want him to have one before he is born. Your short-term man
can change pupils; mine will have only one. You distinguish the preceptor from the
governor: another folly! Do you distinguish the student from the pupil? There is
only one science to teach to children. It is that of man's duties. This science is
one, and whatever Xenophon says about the education of the Per-
[5i]
EMILE
sians,-" it is not divisible. Moreover, I call the master of this science governor
rather than preceptor because his task is less to instruct than to lead. He ought
to give no precepts at all; he ought to make them be discovered.
If the governor must be chosen with so much care, it is certainly permissible for
him to choose his pupil as well, especially when what we are about is propounding a
model. This choice cannot be made on the basis of the child's genius or character,
which can be known only at the end of the work, whereas I am adopting the child
before his birth. If I could choose, I would take only a common mind, such as I
assume my pupil to be. Only ordinary men need to be raised; their education ought
to serve as an example only for that of their kind. The others raise themselves in
spite of what one does.21
Locale is not unimportant in the culture of men. They are all that they can be only
in temperate climates. The disadvantage of extreme climates is obvious. A man is
not planted like a tree in a country to remain there forever; and he who leaves one
extreme to get to the other is forced to travel a road double the length of that
traveled by him who leaves from the middle point for the same destination.
Let the inhabitant of a temperate country visit the two extremes one after the
other. His advantage is still evident, for although he is affected as much as the
one who goes from one extreme to the other, he is nevertheless only half as far
from his natural constitution. A Frenchman can live in Guinea and in Lapland; but a
Negro will not live likewise in Tome, nor a Samoyed in Benin. It appears, moreover,
that the organization of the brain is less perfect in the two extremes. Neither the
Negroes nor the Laplanders have the sense of the Europeans. If, then, I want my
pupil to be able to be an inhabitant of the earth, I will get him in a temperate
zone—in France, for example—rather than elsewhere.
In the north, men consume a lot on barren soil; in the south, they consume little
on fertile soil. From this a new difference is born which makes the ones
industrious and the others contemplative. Society presents us in a single place the
image of these differences between the poor and the rich. The former inhabit the
barren soil, and the latter the fertile country.
The poor man does not need to be educated. His station gives him a compulsory
education. He could have no other. On the contrary, the education the rich man
receives from his station is that which suits him least, from both his own point of
view and that of society. Besides, the natural education ought to make a man fit
for all human conditions. Now, it is less reasonable to raise a poor man to be rich
than a rich man to be poor, for, in proportion to the number of those in the two
stations, there are more men who fall than ones who rise. Let us, then, choose a
rich man. We will at least be sure we have made one more man, while a poor person
can become a man by himself.
For the same reason I will not be distressed if Emile is of noble birth. He will,
in any event, be one victim snatched from prejudice.
Emile is an orphan. It makes no difference whether he has his father and mother.
Charged with their duties, I inherit all their rights. He
[52]
BOOK I
ought to honor his parents, but he ought to obey only me. That is my first or,
rather, my sole condition.
I ought to add the following one, which is only a consequence of the other, that we
never be taken from one another without our consent. This clause is essential, and
I would even want the pupil and the governor to regard themselves as so inseparable
that the lot of each in life is always a common object for them. As soon as they
envisage from afar their separation, as soon as they foresee the moment which is
going to make them strangers to one another, they are already strangers. Each sets
up his own little separate system; and both, engrossed by the time when they will
no longer be together, stay only reluctantly. The disciple regards the master only
as the insignia and the plague of childhood; the master regards the disciple only
as a heavy burden of which he is burning to be relieved. They agree in their
longing for the moment when they will see themselves delivered from one another;
and since there is never a true attachment between them, the one is not going to be
very vigilant, the other not very docile.
But when they regard themselves as people who are going to spend their lives
together, it is important for each to make himself loved by the other; and by that
very fact they become dear to one another. The pupil does not blush at following in
his childhood the friend he is going to have when he is grown. The governor takes
an interest in concerns whose fruit he is going to harvest, and whatever merit he
imparts to his pupil is an investment he makes for his old age.
This agreement made in advance assumes a satisfactory delivery, a child well
formed, vigorous, and healthy. A father has no choice and ought to have no
preferences in the family God gives him. All his children are equally his children;
he owes to them all the same care and the same tenderness. Whether they are
crippled or not, whether they are sickly or robust, each of them is a deposit of
which he owes an account to the hand from which he receives it; and marriage is a
contract made with nature as well as between the spouses.
But whoever imposes on himself a duty that nature has in no way imposed on him
ought to be sure beforehand that he has the means of fulfilling it. Otherwise he
makes himself accountable even for what he will have been unable to accomplish. He
who takes charge of an infirm and valetudinary pupil changes his function from
governor to male nurse. In caring for a useless life, he loses the time which he
had intended to use for increasing its value. He exposes himself to facing an
afflicted mother reproaching him one day for the death of a son whom he has
preserved for her for a long time.
I would not take on a sickly and ill-constituted child, were he to live until
eighty. I want no pupil always useless to himself and others, involved uniquely
with preserving himself, whose body does damage to the education of his soul. What
would I be doing in vainly lavishing my cares on him other than doubling society's
loss and taking two men from it instead of one? Let another in my stead take charge
of this invalid. I consent to it and approve his charity. But that is not my
talent. I am not able to teach living to one who thinks of nothing but how to keep
himself from dying.
[53]
EMILE
The body must be vigorous in order to obey the soul. A good servant ought to be
robust. I know that intemperance excites the passions; in the long run it also
wears out the body. Mortifications and fasts often produce the same effect by a
contrary cause. The weaker the body, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the
more it obeys. All the sensual passions lodge in effeminated bodies. They become
more inflamed to the extent that the body can satisfy them less.
A frail body weakens the soul. This is the origin of the empire of medicine, an art
more pernicious to men than all the ills it claims to cure. As for me, I do not
know of what illness the doctors cure us; but I do know that they give us quite
fatal ones: cowardice, pusillanimity, credulousness, terror of death. If they cure
the body, they kill courage. What difference does it make to us that they make
cadavers walk? It is men we need, and none is seen leaving their hands.
Medicine is the fashion among us. It ought to be. It is the entertainment of idle
people without occupation who, not knowing what to do with their time, pass it in
preserving themselves. If they had had the bad luck to be born immortal, they would
be the most miserable of beings. A life they would never fear losing would be
worthless for them. These people need doctors who threaten them in order to cater
to them and who give them every day the only pleasure of which they are susceptible
—that of not being dead.
I have no intention of enlarging on the vanity of medicine here. My object is only
to consider it from the moral point of view. I can, nevertheless, not prevent
myself from remarking that men make, concerning its use, the same sophisms as they
make concerning the quest for truth. They always assume that, in treating a sick
person, one cures him and that, in seeking a truth, one finds it. They do not see
that it is necessary to balance the advantage of a cure effected by the doctor
against the death of a hundred sick persons killed by him, and the usefulness of a
truth discovered against the harm done by the errors which become current at the
same time. Science which instructs and medicine which cures are doubtless very
good. But science which deceives and medicine which kills are bad. Learn,
therefore, to distinguish them. That is the crux of the question. If we knew how to
be ignorant of the truth, we would never be the dupes of lies; if we knew how not
to want to be cured in spite of nature, we would never die at the doctor's hand.
These two abstinences would be wise; one would clearly gain by submitting to them.
I do not, therefore, dispute that medicine is useful to some men, but I say that it
is fatal to humankind.
I will be told, as I am incessantly, that the mistakes are the doctor's, while
medicine in itself is infallible. That is all very well. But then let it come
without the doctor, for so long as they come together, there will be a hundred
times more to fear from the errors of the artist than to hope from the help of the
art.
This lying art, made more for the ills of the mind than for those of the body, is
no more useful for the former than for the latter. It less cures us of our maladies
than impresses us with terror of them. It less puts off death than makes it felt
ahead of time. It wears out life more than prolongs it. And even if it did prolong
life, this would still be at the
[54]
BOOK I
expense of the species, since it takes us from society by the care it imposes on us
and from our duties by the terror it inspires in us. It is the knowledge of dangers
that makes us fear them; he who believed himself invulnerable would fear nothing.
By dint of arming Achilles against peril, the poet takes from him the merit of
valor; every other man in his place would have been an Achilles at the same price.
Do you want to find men of a true courage? Look for them in the places where there
are no doctors, where they are ignorant of the consequences of illnesses, where
they hardly think of death. Naturally man knows how to suffer with constancy and
dies in peace. It is doctors with their prescriptions, philosophers with their
precepts, priests with their exhortations, who debase his heart and make him
unlearn how to die.22
Let me be given, then, a pupil who does not need all those people, or I shall
refuse him. I do not want others to ruin my work. I want to raise him alone or not
get involved. The wise Locke, who spent a part of his life in the study of
medicine, strongly recommends never using drugs on children either as a precaution
or for slight discomforts.-3 I shall go farther, and I declare that, never calling
a doctor for myself, I shall never call one for my Emile, unless his life is in
evident danger, for then the doctor can do him no worse than kill him.
I know quite well that the doctor will not fail to take advantage of this delay. If
the child dies, the doctor will have been called too late; if the child recovers,
it will be the doctor who saved him. So be it. Let the doctor triumph, but, above
all, let him be called only in extremis.
For want of knowing how to cure himself, let the child know how to be sick. This
art takes the place of the other and is often much more successful. It is nature's
art. When an animal is sick, it suffers in silence and keeps quiet. Now one does
not see more sickly animals than men. How many people whose disease would have
spared them and whom time by itself would have cured have been killed by
impatience, fear, anxiety, and, above all, remedies? I will be told that animals,
living in a way that conforms more to nature, ought to be subject to fewer ills
than we are. Well, their way of life is precisely the one I want to give to my
pupil. He ought, therefore, to get the same advantage from it.
The only useful part of medicine is hygiene. And hygiene is itself less a science
than a virtue. Temperance and work are the two true doctors of man. Work sharpens
his appetite, and temperance prevents him from abusing it.
In order to know what regimen is the most useful for life and health, one need only
know the way of life followed by the peoples who are healthiest, most robust, and
longest-lived. If on the basis of general observations one does not find that the
use of medicine gives men sounder health or a longer life, by the very fact that
this art is not useful, it is harmful, since it employs time, men, and things at a
total loss. It is not only that the time spent in preserving life, lost for use,
must be subtracted from it, but that when this time is employed in tormenting
ourselves, it is worse than nothing. It is a negative quantity, and, to calculate
equitably, we must subtract an equal amount from the remainder of our time. A man
who lives ten years without doctors
[55]
EMILE
lives more for himself and for others than he who lives thirty years as their
victim. Having had the experience of both alternatives, I believe I have more right
than anyone to draw this conclusion.
These are my reasons for wanting only a robust and healthy pupil and my principles
for keeping him that way. I will not stop to prove at length the utility of manual
labor and bodily exercise for reinforcing constitution and health. That is disputed
by no one; the examples of the longest lives are almost all drawn from men who
exercised most, who endured the most fatigue and work.* Neither shall I enter into
lengthy detail about the efforts I shall take to achieve this single objective. It
will be seen that they enter so necessarily into my practice that it suffices to
grasp their spirit not to need further explanation.
With life there begin needs. For the newly born a nurse is required. If the mother
consents to perform her duty, very well. She will be given written instructions,
for this advantage has its counterpoise and keeps the governor at something more of
a distance from his pupil. But it is to be believed that the child's interest and
esteem for the one to whom she is willing to confide so dear a deposit will make
the mother attentive to the master's opinion. And whatever she is willing to do,
one can be sure will be done better by her than anyone else. If we have to have a
stranger for a nurse, let us begin by choosing her well.
One of the miseries of rich people is to be deceived in everything. If they judge
men poorly, need one be surprised? It is riches which corrupt them, and by a just
return they are the first to feel the defect of the only instrument known to them.
Everything is done badly in their houses, except what they do themselves; and they
almost never do anything there. Is it a question of looking for a nurse? They let
the obstetrician choose her. What is the result of that? That the best nurse is
always the one who paid him best. I shall not, hence, go consult an obstetrician
about Emile's nurse. I shall take care to choose her myself. I will not perhaps
reason so fluently about the issue as a surgeon, but I will certainly be in better
faith, and my zeal will deceive me less than his avarice.
This choice is not such a great mystery. The rules for it are known. But I do not
know whether one ought not to pay a bit more attention to the age of the milk as
well as to its quality. New milk is completely serous. It must be almost a laxative
in order to purge the remains of the meconium, thickened in the intestines of the
child who has just been
* Here is an example drawn from English papers which provides so many reflections
concerning my subject that I cannot refrain from reporting it:
An individual named Patrick O'Neil, born in 1647, has just remarried for the
seventh time in 1760. He served in the Dragoons in the seventeenth year of the
reign of Charles II and in different regiments until his discharge in 1740. He took
part in all the campaigns of King William and the Duke of Marlborough. This man has
never drunk anything but ordinary beer. He has always fed on vegetables and never
eaten meat except at some meals he gave for his family. His practice has always
been to rise and go to bed with the sun unless his duties prevented him from doing
so. He is at present in his one hundred and thirteenth year, of good understanding,
in good health, and walking without a cane. In spite of his great age, he does not
remain idle for a single minute, and every Sunday he goes to his parish accompanied
by his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
[56]
BOOK I
born. Little by little the milk gains consistency and provides a solider food for
the child who has become stronger to digest it. It is surely not for nothing that
in the females of every species nature changes the milk's consistency according to
the age of the nursling.
Therefore, a nurse who has newly given birth would be required for a newly born
child. This has its complications, I know. But as soon as one leaves the natural
order, to do anything well has its complications. The only easy expedient is to do
it badly; that is, thus, the expedient men choose.
What is needed is a nurse as healthy of heart as of body. Imbalance of the
passions, like that of the humors, can cause the milk to deteriorate. Moreover, to
restrict the question to the physical alone is to see only half of the object. The
milk can be good, and the nurse bad. A good character is as essential as a good
constitution. If one takes a vicious woman, I do not say that one's nursling will
contract her vices, but I do say he will suffer as a result of them. Does she not,
along with her milk, owe him care which requires zeal, patience, gentleness,
cleanliness? If she is a glutton, an intemperate, she will soon have spoiled her
milk. If she is negligent or easily angered, what will become of a poor unfortunate
who is at her mercy and who can neither defend himself nor complain? Never in
anything whatsoever are the wicked good for anything good.
The choice of the nurse is all the more important because her nursling is going to
have no other governess than her, just as he is going to have no other preceptor
than his governor. This was the practice of the ancients, less reasoners and wiser
than we are. After having nursed female children, nurses never left them. That is
why in their theater plays most of the confidants are nurses. It is impossible that
a child who passes successively through so many different hands ever be well
raised. At every change he makes secret comparisons which always tend to diminish
his esteem for those who govern him and consequently their authority over him. If
he once comes to the thought that there are adults who are no more possessed of
reason than are children, all the authority of age is lost, and the education is a
failure. A child ought to know no other superiors than his father and his mother
or, in default of them, his nurse and his governor; even one of the two is already
too many. But this division is inevitable, and all that one can do to remedy it is
to make sure that the persons of the two sexes who govern him are in such perfect
agreement concerning him that the two are only one as far as he is concerned.
The nurse must live a bit more comfortably, eat a little more substantial food, but
not change her manner of living entirely, for a sudden and total change, even from
bad to better, is always dangerous for the health. And since her ordinary diet left
or rendered her healthy and well constituted, what is the good of making her change
it?
Peasant women eat less meat and more vegetables than do city women. This vegetable
diet appears to be more beneficial than injurious to them and their children When
they have bourgeois nurslings, they are given boiled beef in the conviction that
soup and meat both produce
[57]
EMILE
better chyle in them and result in more milk. I by no means share this sentiment,
and I am supported by experience which teaches that children thus nursed are more
subject to colic and worms than are others.
This is hardly surprising, since animal substance in a state of putrefaction is
crawling with worms, which does not happen in like manner with vegetable substance.
Milk, although developed in the body of the animal, is a vegetable substance.* Its
analysis demonstrates it. It easily turns into acid; and, far from giving any
vestige of volatile alkali, as do animal substances, it gives, as do plants, a
neutral essence of salt.
The milk of herbivorous females is sweeter and healtheir than that of carnivores.
Formed from a substance homogeneous with its own, it preserves its nature better
and becomes less subject to putrefaction. If one looks to quantity, everyone knows
that the farinaceous foods produce more blood than does meat; they ought,
therefore, to make more milk, too. I cannot believe that a child who was not weaned
too soon, or who was weaned only on vegetable foods and whose nurse also lived only
on vegetables, would ever be subject to worms.
It is possible that vegetable foods produce milk that sours more quickly. But I am
far from regarding sour milk as an unhealthy food. Whole peoples who have no other
kind are quite well off, and all these devices for absorbing acids appear to me to
be pure charlatanry. There are constitutions for which milk is just not suitable,
and then no absorbent can make it bearable for them; the others bear it without
absorbents. Separated or curdled milk is feared; that is foolish, since it is known
that milk always curdles in the stomach. It is thus that it becomes a food solid
enough to nourish children and animal babies. If it did not curdle at all, it would
just go through; it would not nourish them.t One can very well cut milk in
countless ways, use countless absorbents, but whoever eats milk digests cheese.
This is without exception. The stomach is so well made for curdling milk that it is
with a calf's stomach that rennet is made.
I think, then, that instead of changing the ordinary food of nurses, it suffices to
give them the same kind of food but in more abundant quantity and better quality.
It is not due to the nature of the foods that the vegetarian diet constipates. It
is only their seasoning that makes them unhealthy. Reform the rules of your
kitchen. Have neither brown sauce nor grease. Put neither butter nor salt nor dairy
products on the fire. Let your vegetables, cooked in water, be seasoned only on
coming hot to the table. Vegetarian food, far from constipating the nurse, will
provide her with milk in abundance and of better quality. + Is it possible
* Women eat bread, vegetables, dairy produce. The females of dogs and cats eat
them, too. Even she-wolves graze. These are the sources of vegetable juices for
their milk. There remains to be examined the milk of species which can eat
absolutely only flesh, if there are any such, which I doubt.
t Although the juices which nourish us are in liquid form, they have to be pressed
out of solid foods. A man at work who lived only on broth would very quickly waste
away. He would sustain himself much better with milk because it curdles.
t Those who want to discuss at greater length the advantages and the disadvantages
of the Pythagorean diet can consult the treatises which Dr. Cocchi and his
adversary. Dr. Bianchi. wrote on this important subject.21
[58]
BOOK I
that the vegetable diet being recognized as best for the child, the animal diet is
the best for the nurse? There is something contradictory in that.
It is especially in the first years of life that the air acts on the constitution
of children. It penetrates a delicate and soft skin by all the pores. It has a
powerful effect on these newborn bodies; it makes on them impressions which are
never effaced. I would not, hence, be of the opinion that one should take a peasant
woman from her village to close her up in a room in the city and make her nurse the
child at home. I prefer his going to breathe the good air of the country to her
breathing the bad air of the city. He will assume the station of his new mother; he
will live in her rustic house, and his governor will follow him there. The reader
will well remember that this governor is not a hired man; he is the father's
friend. "But if this friend is not to be found, if this move is not easy, if
nothing of what you advise is feasible, what is to be done instead?" I will be
asked. ... I have already told you: what you are doing. One needs no advice for
that.
Men are made not to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth
which they should cultivate. The more they come together, the more they are
corrupted. The infirmities of the body, as well as the vices of the soul, are the
unfailing effect of this overcrowding. Man is, of all the animals, the one who can
least live in herds. Men crammed together like sheep would all perish in a very
short time. Man's breath is deadly to his kind. This is no less true in the literal
sense than the figurative.
Cities are the abyss of the human species. At the end of a few generations the
races perish or degenerate. They must be renewed, and it is always the country
which provides for this renewal. Send your children, then, to renew themselves, as
it were, and to regain in the midst of the fields the vigor that is lost in the
unhealthy air of overpopulated places. Pregnant women who are in the country rush
to return to the city for their confinement. They ought to do exactly the opposite,
particularly those who want to nurse their children. They would have less to regret
than they think; and in an abode more natural to the species, the pleasures
connected with the duties of nature would soon efface the taste for the pleasures
not related to those duties.
At first, after the confinement, the child is washed with some warm water in which
wine is ordinarily mixed. This addition of wine hardly appears to me to be
necessary. Since nature produces nothing fermented, it is not to be believed that
the use of an artificial liquor is important for the life of its creatures.
For the same reason this precaution of warming the water is not indispensable
either; and, in fact, multitudes of peoples wash newborn children in rivers or the
sea without further ado. But ours, softened before birth by the softness of the
fathers and the mothers, bring with them, on coming into the world, an already
spoiled constitution that must not be exposed at the beginning to all the trials
which would restore it. It is only by degrees that our children can be led back to
their primitive vigor. Begin, then, at first by following the established practice,
and deviate from it only little by little. Wash the children often; their dirtiness
proves the need for it; when one only wipes them, one
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EMILE
lacerates them. But to the extent that they regain strength, diminish by degrees
the warmth of the water, until at the end you wash them summer and winter in cold
and even chilly water. Since in order not to expose them it is important that this
diminution be slow, successive, and imperceptible, a thermometer can be used to
measure it exactly.
This practice of bathing, once established, ought never again be interrupted, and
it is important to keep to it for the whole of life. I am considering it not only
from the point of view of cleanliness and present health; but I also see it as a
salutary precaution for making the texture of the fibers more flexible and able to
adapt to various degrees of heat and cold without effort and without risk. For that
purpose I would want him in growing up to become accustomed little by little to
bathing sometimes in hot water at all bearable degrees and often in cold water at
all possible degrees. Thus, after being habituated to bear the various temperatures
of water which, being a denser fluid, touches us at more points and affects us
more, one would become almost insensitive to the various temperatures of the air.
From the moment that the child breathes on leaving its envelope, do not suffer his
being given other envelopes which keep him more restricted: no caps, no belts, no
swaddling; loose and large diapers which leave all his limbs free and are neither
so heavy as to impede his movements nor so hot as to prevent him from feeling the
impressions of the air.* Put him in a large, well-padded cradle,t where he can move
at ease and without danger. When he begins to grow stronger, let him crawl around
the room. Let him spread out, stretch his little limbs. You will see them gaining
strength day by day. Compare him with a well-swaddled child of the same age; you
will be surprised at the difference in their progress. +
* Children in cities are suffocated by dint of being kept closed up and dressed.
Those who govern them have yet to learn that cold air, far from doing children
harm, strengthens them and that hot air weakens them, gives them fever, and kills
them.
t I say a "cradle" to use a current word, for want of another; for I am, moreover,
persuaded that it is never necessary to rock children, and that this practice is
often
pernicious for them.
X The ancient Peruvians left the arms of the children free in a very large
swaddling band. When they took the children out, they set them free in a hole made
in the ground and lined with linen; into it they lowered the children up to the
waist. In this way the children had their arms free, and they could move their
heads and bend their bodies at will without falling and without getting hurt. As
soon as they could take a step, the breast was offered to them from a little
farther away, as a lure to oblige them to walk. Little Negroes are sometimes in a
far more fatiguing position for sucking. They embrace one of their mother's hips
with their knees and their feet, and they hold on so tightly that they can support
themselves there without aid of the mother's arms. They attach themselves to the
breast with their hands, and they suck continuously without moving from their place
and without falling, in spite of the different movements of the mother, who during
this time works as usual. These children begin to walk from the second month or,
rather, to drag themselves on their hands and knees. This exercise gives them a
facility for later running in this position almost as fast as if they were on their
feet. [Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, Vol. IV, in-12, p. 192.]
To these examples M. de Buffon could have added that of England, where the
extravagant and barbarous practice of swaddling is being done away with day by day.
See also la Loubere, Voyage de Siam, Mr. le Beau, Voyage du Canada, etc. I could
fill twenty pages with citations, if I needed to confirm this by facts.25
[60]
BOOK I
One must expect strong opposition on the part of the nurses, who are less bothered
by a well-garroted child than by one who has to be constantly watched. Moreover,
his dirtiness becomes more easily sensed in an open garment; he must be cleaned
more often. Finally, in certain countries custom is an argument that one will never
refute to the satisfaction of the people no matter what their station.
Do not reason with nurses. Give orders, see that they are followed, and spare no
effort to make things easy for the nurses in carrying out the care that you have
prescribed. Why would you not share that care? In ordinary nursing where one only
looks to the physical side, provided that the child lives and does not waste away
the rest has little importance. But here, where the education begins with life, the
child is at birth already a disciple, not of the governor, but of nature. The
governor only studies under this first master and prevents its care from being
opposed. He watches over the nursling, observes him, follows him. He vigilantly
spies out the first glimmer of his weak understanding as the Muslims at the
approach of the new moon spy out the instant of its rise.
We are born capable of learning but able to do nothing, knowing nothing. The soul,
enchained in imperfect and half-formed organs, does not even have the sentiment of
its own existence. The movements and the cries of the child who has just been born
are purely mechanical effects, devoid of knowledge and of will.
Let us suppose that a child had at his birth the stature and the strength of a
grown man, that he emerged, so to speak, fully armed from his mother's womb as did
Pallas from the brain of Jupiter. This man-child would be a perfect imbecile, an
automaton, an immobile and almost insensible statue. He would see nothing, hear
nothing, know no one, would not be able to turn his eyes toward what he needed to
see. Not only would he perceive no object outside of himself, he would not even
relate any object to the sense organ which made him perceive it: the colors would
not be in his eyes; the sounds would not be in his ears; the bodies he touched
would not be on his body; he would not even know that he had one. The contact of
his hands would be in his brain; all his sensations would come together in a single
point; he would exist only in the common sensorium; he would have only a single
idea, that is, of the I to which he would relate all his sensations; and this idea
or, rather, this sentiment would be the only thing that he would have beyond what
an ordinary baby has.
Nor would this man formed all of a sudden be able to stand on his feet; he would
need a good deal of time to learn to maintain himself in equilibrium on them.
Perhaps he would not even make the attempt, and you would see this big body, strong
and robust, staying in place like a stone, or crawling and dragging himself along
like a newborn puppy.
He would feel the discomfort of the needs without knowing them and without
imagining any means of providing for them. There is no immediate communication
between the muscles of the stomach and those of the arms and legs which, even if he
were surrounded by food, would cause him to make a step to approach it or stretch
out his hand
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EMILE
to grasp it. And since his body would have had its growth, his limbs would be
entirely developed, and consequently he would not have the restlessness and
constant movement of children. He could die of hunger before stirring to seek
subsistence. However little one may have reflected on the order and the progress of
our knowledge, it cannot be denied that such was pretty nearly the primitive state
of ignorance and stupidity natural to man before he learned anything from
experience or his fellows.
Hence we know, or can know, the first point from which each of us starts in order
to get to the common level of understanding. But who knows the other limit? Each
advances more or less according to his genius, his taste, his needs, his talents,
his zeal, and the occasions he has to devote himself to them. I know of no
philosopher who has yet been so bold as to say: this is the limit of what man can
attain and beyond which he cannot go. We do not know what our nature permits us to
be. None of us has measured the distance which can exist between one man and
another. What soul is so base that he has never been warmed by this idea and does
not sometimes in his pride say to himself: "How many men I have already surpassed!
How many I can still reach! Why should my equal go farther than I?"
I repeat: the education of man begins at his birth; before speaking, before
understanding, he is already learning. Experience anticipates lessons. The moment
he knows his nurse, he has already acquired a great deal. One would be surprised at
the knowledge of the coarsest man if one followed his progress from the moment of
his birth to where he is now. If one divided all of human science into two parts—
the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned—the latter would be
quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is
generally attained, because it is attained without thought and even before the age
of reason; because, moreover, learning is noticed only by its differences, and as
in algebraic equations, common quantities count for nothing.
Even animals acquire much. They have senses; they have to learn to make use of
them. They have needs; they have to learn to provide for them. They have to learn
how to eat, to walk, to fly. The quadrupeds who stand on their legs from birth do
not on that account know how to walk. One sees from their first steps that these
are unsure attempts. Canaries escaped from their cages do not know how to fly
because they have never flown. Everything is learning for animate and sensitive
beings. If plants had progressive movement, they would have to have senses and to
acquire knowledge. Otherwise, the species would soon perish.
Children's first sensations are purely affective; they perceive only pleasure and
pain. Able neither to walk nor to grasp, they need a great deal of time to come
little by little into possession of the representative sensations which show them
objects outside of themselves. But, while waiting for these objects to gain
extension, to move, so to speak, farther away from their eyes, to take on
dimensions and shapes for them, the recurrence of the affective sensations begins
to submit them to the empire of habit. One sees their eyes constantly turning
toward the light
[62]
BOOK I
and, if it comes to them from the side, imperceptibly taking that direction, so
that we ought to take care to set them facing the light, lest they become cross-
eyed or accustomed to looking askance. They must also early get habituated to
darkness. Otherwise, they cry and scream as soon as they are in obscurity. Food and
sleep too exactly measured become necessary for them at the end of the same spans
of time, and soon desire no longer comes from need but from habit, or, rather,
habit adds a new need to that of nature. That is what must be prevented.
The only habit that a child should be allowed is to contract none. Do not carry him
on one arm more than the other; do not accustom him to give one hand rather than
the other, to use one more than the other, to want to eat, sleep, or be active at
the same hours, to be unable to remain alone night or day. Prepare from afar the
reign of his freedom and the use of his forces by leaving natural habit to his
body, by putting him in the condition always to be master of himself and in all
things to do his will, as soon as he has one.
From the moment that the child begins to distinguish objects, it is important that
there be selectivity in those one shows him. Naturally all new objects interest
man. He feels so weak that he fears everything he does not know. The habit of
seeing new objects without being affected by them destroys this fear. Children
raised in clean houses where no spiders are tolerated are afraid of spiders, and
this fear often stays with them when grown. I have never seen a peasant, man,
woman, or child, afraid of spiders.
Why, then, should a child's education not begin before he speaks and understands,
since the very choice of objects presented to him is fit to make him timid or
courageous? I want him habituated to seeing new objects, ugly, disgusting, peculiar
animals, but little by little, from afar, until he is accustomed to them, and, by
dint of seeing them handled by others, he finally handles them himself. If during
his childhood he has without fright seen toads, snakes, crayfish, he will, when
grown, without disgust see any animal whatsoever. There are no longer frightful
objects for whoever sees such things every day.
All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Emile a mask with a pleasant
face. Next someone in his presence puts this mask over his face. I start to laugh;
everybody laughs; and the child laughs like the others. Little by little I accustom
him to less pleasant masks and finally to hideous faces. If I have arranged my
gradation well, far from being frightened by the last mask, he will laugh at it as
at the first. After that I no longer fear that he can be frightened by masks.
When, during the farewell of Andromache and Hector, the little Astyanax, frightened
by the plume waving on his father's helmet, fails to recognize him, flings himself
crying on his nurse's bosom, and extracts from his mother a smile mingled with
tears, what must be done to cure this fright? Precisely what Hector does: put the
helmet on the ground, and then caress the child. In a more tranquil moment one
would not stop at that. One would approach the helmet, play with the feathers, make
the child handle them. Finally, the nurse would take the helmet and, laughing, put
it on her own head—if, that is, a woman's hand dare touch the arms of Hector.26
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EMILE
Is one trying to train Emile to the sound of a firearm? At first I set off a cap in
a pistol. The sudden and momentary flash, that sort of lightning, delights him. I
repeat the same thing with more powder. Little by little I put a small charge
without a wad into the pistol; then a bigger one. Finally I accustom him to rifle
shots, to grapeshot explosions, to canons, to the most terrible detonations.
I have noticed that children are rarely afraid of thunder, unless the claps are
terrible and really wound the organ of hearing. Otherwise, this fear comes to them
only when they have learned that thunder sometimes wounds or kills. When reason
begins to frighten them, make habit reassure them. With a slow and carefully
arranged gradation man and child are made intrepid in everything.
At the beginning of life when memory and imagination are still inactive, the child
is attentive only to what affects his senses at the moment. Since his sensations
are the first materials of his knowledge, to present them to him in an appropriate
order is to prepare his memory to provide them one day to his understanding in the
same order. But inasmuch as he is attentive only to his sensations, it suffices at
first to show him quite distinctly the connection of these same sensations with the
objects which cause them. He wants to touch everything, handle everything. Do not
oppose yourself to this restlessness. It is suggestive to him of a very necessary
apprenticeship; it is thus that he learns to feel the hotness, the coldness, the
hardness, the softness, the heaviness, the lightness, of bodies, and to judge their
size, their shape, and all their sensible qualities by looking, feeling,*
listening, particularly by comparing sight to touch, by estimating with the eye the
sensation that they would make on his finger.
It is only by movement that we learn that there are things which are not us, and it
is only by our own movement that we acquire the idea of extension. It is because
the child does not have this idea that, without making any distinction, he reaches
out his hand to grasp the object which touches him or the object which is at a
hundred paces from him. This effort he makes appears to you a sign of the desire to
dominate, an order he gives to the object to approach or to you to bring it to him;
but that is not at all so. It is only that the same objects which he sees at first
in his brain, then in his eyes, he now sees at the end of his arms and can imagine
no extension other than that which he can reach. Take care then to walk him often,
to transport him from one place to another, to make him feel change of place, in
order to teach him to judge distances. When he begins to know them, then the method
must be changed, and he must be carried as you please and not as he pleases; for as
soon as he is no longer abused by sense, the cause of his effort changes. This
change is remarkable and requires explanation.
The discomfort of the needs is expressed by signs when another's help is necessary
to provide for them. This is the source of children's screams. They cry a lot; such
ought to be the case. Since all their
* Smell is of all the senses the one that develops the latest in children. Up to
the age of two or three years it does not appear that they^are sensitive to either
good or bad smells. They have in this respect the indifference or, rather, the
insensibility that is observed in many animals.
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BOOK I
sensations are affective, when they are pleasant, children enjoy them in silence.
When they are painful, children say so in their language and ask for relief. Now so
long as they are awake, they are almost unable to remain in an indifferent state.
They sleep or are affected.
All our languages are works of art. Whether there was a language natural and common
to all men has long been a subject of research. Doubtless there is such a language,
and it is the one children speak before knowing how to speak. This language is not
articulate, but it is accented, sonorous, intelligible. The habit of our languages
has made us neglect that language to the point of forgetting it completely. Let us
study children, and we shall soon relearn it with them. Nurses are our masters in
this language. They understand everything their nurslings say; they respond to
them; they have quite consistent dialogues with them; and, although they pronounce
words, these words are perfectly useless; it is not the sense of the word that
children understand but the accent which accompanies it.
To the language of the voice is joined that of gesture, no less energetic. This
gesture is not in children's weak hands; it is on their visages. It is surprising
how much expression these ill-formed faces already have. Their features change from
one instant to the next with an inconceivable rapidity. You see a smile, desire,
fright come into being and pass away like so many flashes of lightning. Each time
you believe you are seeing a different visage. Their facial muscles are certainly
more mobile than ours. On the other hand, their dull eyes say almost nothing. Such
should be the character of the signs they give at an age when one has only bodily
needs. The expression of the sensations is in grimaces; the expression of
sentiments is in glances.
Since the first condition of man is want and weakness, his first voices are
complaint and tears. The child feels his needs and cannot satisfy them. He implores
another's help by screams. If he is hungry or thirsty, he cries; if he is too cold
or too hot, he cries; if he needs to move and is kept at rest, he cries; if he
wants to sleep and is stirred, he cries. The less his mode of being is in his
control, the more frequently he asks for it to be changed. He has only one language
because he has, so to speak, only one kind of discomfort. In the imperfection of
his organs he does not distinguish their diverse impressions; all ills form for him
only one sensation of pain.
From these tears that we might think so little worthy of attention is born man's
first relation to all that surrounds him; here is formed the first link in that
long chain of which the social order is formed.
When the child cries, he is uncomfortable; he has some need which he does not know
how to satisfy. One examines, one seeks this need, one finds it, one provides for
it. When one does not find it or when one cannot provide for it, the tears
continue. One is bothered by them; one caresses the child to make him keep quiet,
one rocks him, one sings to him to make him go to sleep. If he persists, one gets
impatient, one threatens him; brutal nurses sometimes strike him. These are strange
lessons for his entrance in life.
I shall never forget having seen one of these difficult cryers thus struck by his
nurse. He immediately kept quiet. I believed he was in-
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EMILE
timidated. I said to myself, "This will be a servile soul from which one will get
nothing except by severity." I was mistaken. The unfortunate was suffocating with
anger; he had lost his breath; I saw him become violet. A moment after came sharp
screams; all the signs of the resentment, fury, and despair of this age were in his
accents. I feared he would expire in this agitation. If I had doubted that the
sentiment of the just and the unjust were innate in the heart of man, this example
alone would have convinced me. I am sure that a live ember fallen by chance on this
child's hand would have made less of an impression than this blow, rather light but
given in the manifest intention of offending him.
This disposition of children to fury, spite, and anger requires extreme
attentiveness. Boerhaave-'7 thinks that their illnesses belong for the most part to
the convulsive class; since their heads are proportionally larger and their nerves
more extended than in adults, the nervous system is more susceptible to irritation.
Keep away from them with the greatest care domestics who provoke, irritate, or
annoy them; they are a hundred times more dangerous, more deadly for children than
the injuries of the air and the seasons. As long as children find resistance only
in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and
will preserve their health better. Here is one of the reasons why the children of
the people, freer, more independent, are generally less infirm, less delicate, more
robust than those who are allegedly better brought up by being endlessly thwarted.
But it must always be borne in mind that there is quite a difference between
obeying children and not thwarting them.
The first tears of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become
orders. Children begin by getting themselves assisted; they end by getting
themselves served. Thus, from their own weakness, which is in the first place the
source of the feeling of their dependence, is subsequently born the idea of empire
and domination. But since this idea is excited less by their needs than by our
services, at this point moral effects whose immediate cause is not in nature begin
to make their appearance; and one sees already why it is important from the
earliest age to disentangle the secret intention which dictates the gesture or the
scream.
When the child stretches out his hand without saying anything, he believes he will
reach the object because he does not estimate the distance. He is mistaken. But
when he complains and screams in reaching out his hand, he is no longer deceived as
to the distance; he is ordering the object to approach or you to bring it to him.
In the first case carry him to the object slowly and with small steps. In the
second act as though you do not even hear him. The more he screams, the less you
should listen to him. It is important to accustom him early not to give orders
either to men, for he is not their master, or to things, for they do not hear him.
Thus, when a child desires something that he sees and one wants to give it to him,
it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the object to the
child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropriate to his age, and there
is no other means to suggest it to him.
[66]
BOOK I
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre 28 called men big children. One could, reciprocally, call
children little men. These propositions have their truth as sententious phrases; as
principles they need clarification. But when Hobbes called the wicked man a robust
child,29 he said something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from
weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be
good. He who could do everything would never do harm. Of all the attributes of the
all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without which one can least conceive it.
All peoples who have recognized two principles have always regarded the bad as
inferior to the good; if they had done otherwise, they would have been supposing
something absurd. See hereafter the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.30
Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. Conscience, which makes us love the
former and hate the latter, although independent of reason, cannot therefore be
developed without it. Before the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing
it, and there is no morality in our actions, although there sometimes is in the
sentiment of other's actions which have a relation to us. A child wants to upset
everything he sees; he smashes, breaks everything he can reach. He grabs a bird as
he would grab a stone, and he strangles it without knowing what he does.
Why is that? In the first place, philosophy will explain it as being a result of
natural vices: pride, the spirit of domination, amour-propre, the wickedness of
man; and the feeling of his weakness, philosophy could add, makes the child avid to
perform acts of strength and to prove his own power to himself. But see this old
man, infirm and broken, led back by the circle of human life to the weakness of
childhood. Not only does he remain immobile and peaceful, he also wants everything
around him to remain that way. The least change troubles and disturbs him. He would
want to see a universal calm reign. How would the same impotence joined to the same
passions produce such different effects in the two ages if their primary cause were
not changed? And where can one look for this diversity of causes if not in the
respective physical condition of the two individuals? The active principle common
to both is developing in the one and being extinguished in the other; the one is
being formed, the other destroyed; the one is tending toward life, the other toward
death. The failing activity is concentrated in the old man's heart; in that of the
child it is superabundant and extends outward; he senses within himself, so to
speak, enough life to animate everything surrounding him. That he do or undo is a
matter of no importance; it suffices that he change the condition of things, and
every change is an action. If he seems to have more of an inclination to destroy,
it is not from wickedness but because the action which gives shape is always slow
and the action which destroys, being more rapid, fits his vivacity better.
At the same time that the Author of nature gives children this active principle, by
allowing them little strength to indulge it, He takes care that it do little harm.
But as soon as they can consider the people who surround them as instruments
depending on them to be set in motion, they make use of those people to follow
their inclination and to supple-
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EMILE
ment their own weakness. That is how they become difficult, tyrannical, imperious,
wicked, unmanageable—a development which does not come from a natural spirit of
domination but which rather gives one to them, for it does not require long
experience to sense how pleasant it is to act with the hands of others and to need
only to stir one's tongue to make the universe move.
In growing, one gains strength, becomes less restless, less fidgety, withdraws more
into oneself. Soul and body find, so to speak, an equilibrium, and nature asks no
more of us than the movement necessary to our preservation. But the desire to
command is not extinguished with the need that gave birth to it. Dominion awakens
and flatters amour-propre, and habit strengthens it. Thus, whim:il succeeds need;
thus, prejudices and opinion take their first roots.
Once we know the principle, we see clearly the point where one leaves the path of
nature. Let us see what must be done to stay on it.
Far from having superfluous strength, children do not even have enough for
everything nature asks of them. One must, therefore, let them have the use of all
the strength nature gives them—a strength they could not know how to abuse. First
maxim.
One must aid them and supplement what is lacking to them, whether in intelligence
or strength, in all that is connected with physical need. Second maxim.
One must, in the help one gives them, limit oneself solely to the really useful,
without granting anything to whim or to desire without reason; for whim, inasmuch
as it does not come from nature, will not torment them if it has not been induced
in them. Third maxim.
One must study their language and their signs with care in order that, at an age at
which they do not know how to dissimulate, one can distinguish in their desires
what comes immediately from nature and what comes from opinion. Fourth maxim.
The spirit of these rules is to accord children more true freedom and less
dominion, to let them do more by themselves and to exact less from others. Thus,
accustomed early to limiting their desires to their strength, they will feel little
the privation of what is not going to be in their power.
So we have another very important reason for leaving children's bodies and limbs
absolutely free, with the sole precaution of keeping them away from the danger of
falls and putting all that can wound them out of their reach.
Unfailingly, a child whose body and arms are free will cry less than a child bound
in swaddling. The one who knows only the physical needs cries only when he suffers.
And that is a very great advantage, for then one knows exactly when he needs help
and should not delay a moment to give it to him if it is possible. But if you
cannot relieve him, keep quiet without humoring him in order to pacify him. Your
caresses will not cure his colic; however, he will remember what must be done to be
humored, and if he once knows how to make you take care of him at his will, he has
become your master. All is lost.
Less hindered in their movements, children will cry less; less importuned by their
tears, one will torment oneself less to make them
[68]
BOOK I
keep quiet; threatened or humored less often, they will be less fearful or less
stubborn and will stay better in their natural state. It is less in letting
children cry than in rushing to pacify them that they get hernias, and my proof is
that the most neglected children are a great deal less subject to hernias than are
others. I am very far from wanting them to be neglected on that account. On the
contrary, it is important to be beforehand with them and not let oneself be
informed of their needs by their cries. But no more do I want that the care given
them be misunderstood. Why would they stint tears once they see that their tears
are good for so many things? Schooled in the value put on their silence, they are
quite careful not to be prodigal with it. They finally put such a price on it that
it can no longer be paid, and it is then that, by dint of crying unsuccessfully,
they exert themselves, get exhausted, and die.
The lengthy tears of a child who is neither bound nor sick, who is allowed to want
for nothing, are only tears of habit and obstinacy. They are the work not of nature
but of the nurse who, not knowing how to endure the importunity, multiplies it
without dreaming that in making the child keep quiet today one is encouraging him
to cry more tomorrow.
The only means to cure or prevent this habit is not to pay any attention to it. No
one likes to make a useless effort, not even children. They are obstinate in their
attempts; but if you are more constant than they are stubborn, they get weary and
never return to crying again. It is thus that they are spared tears and are
accustomed to shed them only when pain forces them to do so.
Besides, when they cry from whim or obstinacy, a sure means of preventing them from
continuing is to distract them by some pleasant and striking object which makes
them forget that they wanted to cry. Most nurses excel in this art; and, well
controlled, it is very useful. But it is of the most extreme importance that the
child not perceive the intention to distract him, and that he enjoy himself without
believing that one is thinking of him. Now this is where all nurses are
maladroit.32
All children are weaned too soon. The time when they should be weaned is indicated
by teething, and teething is commonly difficult and painful. With a machine-like
instinct the child then regularly brings to his mouth whatever he has in his hand
in order to chew on it. It is thought that one facilitates the operation by giving
him some hard bodies, such as ivory or a bolt, as a teething ring. I believe this
is a mistake. These hard bodies applied to the gums, far from softening them, make
them callous, harden them, and prepare a more difficult and more painful cutting.
Let us always take instinct as our example. Puppies are seen to exercise their
growing teeth not on pebbles, iron, bones, but on wood, leather, rags, soft matter
which give and in which the tooth leaves an imprint.
One no longer knows how to be simple in anything, not even with children: rattles
of silver and gold, and coral, cut crystal glasses, teething rings of every price
and kind. What useless and pernicious affectations! Nothing of all that. No
rattles, no teething rings; little
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EMILE
branches of trees with their fruit and their leaves, a poppy flower in which one
can hear the seeds striking one another, a licorice stick that he can suck and
chew, will give him as much enjoyment as these magnificent gewgaws and will not
have the disadvantage of accustoming him to luxury from his birth.
It has been recognized that pap is not very healthy food. Cooked milk and raw meal
produce a lot of indigestible matter and ill suit our stomachs. In pap the meal is
cooked less than in bread, and what is more it has not fermented. Bread soup and
cream of rice appear preferable to me. If one absolutely wants to make pap, it is
proper to roast the meal a bit beforehand. In my country they make a quite
agreeable and healthy porridge from meal thus toasted. Meat broth and soup are also
mediocre nutriments which ought to be used only as little as possible. It is
important for children to get accustomed to chew in the first place. This is the
true means of facilitating teething, and when they begin to swallow, the salivary
juices mixed with the food facilitate its digestion.
I would, then, first make them chew on dry fruits and on crusts. I would give them
little sticks of hard bread or crackers similar to the bread in Piedmont, which
they call there grisse, to play with. By dint of softening this bread in their
mouths, they would finally swallow a bit of it, their teeth would be cut, and they
would be weaned almost before one noticed it. Peasants ordinarily have quite good
stomachs, and they are weaned with no more ado than that.
Children hear speech from their birth. They are spoken to not only before they
understand what is said to them, but before they can reproduce the voices they
hear. Their still dull organs lend themselves only little by little to imitation of
the sounds dictated to them, and it is not even sure that these sounds at first
carry to their ear as distinctly as to ours. I do not disapprove of the nurse's
entertaining the child with songs and very gay and varied accents. But I do
disapprove of her making him constantly giddy with a multitude of useless words of
which he understands nothing other than the tone she gives them. I would want the
first articulations which he is made to hear to be rare, easy, distinct, often
repeated, and that the words they express relate only to objects of the senses
which can in the first place be shown to the child. The unfortunate facility we
have for dazzling people with words we do not understand begins earlier than is
thought. The schoolboy listens in class to the verbiage of his teacher as he
listened in swaddling clothes to the prattle of his nurse. It seems to me that if
he were raised to understand none of it, this instruction would be most useful.
When one wants to take up the question of the formation of language and of
children's first speech, reflections crowd upon one. Whatever one does, children
will always learn to talk in the same way, and all the philosophic speculations are
of the greatest uselessness here.
In the first place, they have, so to speak, a grammar of their age, whose syntax
has rules more general than ours; and if careful attention were paid, one would be
surprised by the exactness with which they follow certain analogies, very faulty
ones, if you please, but very regular and shocking only by their harshness or
because usage does
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BOOK I
not admit them. I just heard a poor child well scolded by his father for having
said to him: "Mon pere, irai-je-t-y?" Now, one sees that this child followed the
analogy better than do our grammarians. For since one said "Vas-y" to him, why
should he not say "Irai-je-t-y?" Note, moreover, with what address he avoided the
hiatus of "Irai-je-y?" or "Y irai-je?" Is it the poor child's fault if we have
inopportunely removed the determining adverb y from the sentence because we did not
know what to do with it? It is insupportable pedantry and a most superfluous care
to concentrate on correcting children for all these little mistakes in usage which
they never with time fail to correct by themselves. Always speak correctly before
them, arrange that they enjoy themselves with no one as much as with you, and be
sure that imperceptibly their language will be purified on the model of yours
without your ever having chided them.
But an abuse of an entirely different importance and one no less easy to prevent is
when one is in too much of a hurry to make them talk, as if one were afraid that
they will not learn to talk by themselves. This indiscriminate fussing produces an
effect directly contrary to the one sought. As a result, they talk later, more
confusedly; the extreme attention given to everything they say spares them having
to articulate well; and since they hardly deign to open their mouths, many of them
preserve as a consequence for their whole lives faulty pronunciation and indistinct
speech which makes them almost unintelligible.
I have lived a great deal among peasants and have never heard one— either man or
woman, girl or boy—with a burr.33 How does that come to pass? Are the organs of
peasants differently constructed from ours? No, but they are differently exercised.
Facing my window is a hillock on which the local children gather to play. Although
they are rather distant from me, I distinguish perfectly all they say, and I often
draw from it good material for this writing. Every day my ear misleads me as to
their ages. I hear the voices of ten-year-olds; I look, I see the stature and the
features of three- or four-year-olds. I do not limit this experiment to myself
alone. City folk who come to see me and whom I consult about it all fall into the
same error.
What produces it is that, up to five or six, city children, raised indoors and
under the wing of a governess, need only to mutter to make themselves understood.
As soon as they stir their lips, effort is made to hear them. Words are dictated to
them which they repeat poorly; and since the same people are constantly with them,
these people, by dint of paying attention to them, guess what they want to say
rather than what they say.
In the country it is an entirely different thing. A peasant woman is not constantly
with her child; he is forced to learn to say very clearly and loudly what he needs
to make her understand. In the fields the children, scattered, removed from the
father, from the mother, and from the other children, get practice in making
themselves understood at a distance and in measuring the strength of their voices
according to the space which separates them from those by whom they want to be
understood. That is how one truly learns to pronounce, and not by stuttering some
vowels in the ear of an attentive governess. Thus,
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EMILE
when a peasant's child is questioned, shame can prevent him from answering, but
what he says he says clearly; while the maid must serve as an interpreter for the
city child, without which one understands nothing of what he mutters between his
teeth.*
As they grow up boys should correct themselves of this defect in the colleges, and
girls in the convents. In fact, both do speak in general more distinctly than those
who have always been raised in the paternal household. But what prevents them from
ever acquiring a pronunciation as clear as that of peasants is the necessity of
learning many things by heart and of reciting aloud what they have learned: their
study habituates them to mumbling, to pronouncing negligently and badly; the effect
of the recitations is even worse; they look for their words with effort; they drag
out and elongate their syllables. It is impossible when memory falters that the
tongue should not stammer as well. Thus are contracted or preserved the vices of
pronunciation. It will be seen hereafter that my Emile will not have these, or at
least that he will not have contracted them from the same causes.
I agree that the people and the villagers fall into another extreme: that they
almost always talk louder than they should; that, in pronouncing too exactly, they
articulate harshly and coarsely; that they overemphasize; that they choose their
terms poorly; etc.
But to begin with, this extreme appears much less defective to me than the other:
granted that the first law of speech is to make oneself understood, the greatest
mistake one can make is to speak without being understood. To pride oneself on not
accentuating is to pride oneself on depriving sentences of their grace and their
energy. Accentuation is the soul of speech. It gives speech sentiment and truth.
Accentuation lies less than the word does. This is perhaps why well-brought-up
people fear it so much. From the practice of saying everything in the same tone
came the practice of mocking people without their being aware of it. The proscribed
accentuation is succeeded by ways of pronunciation which are ridiculous, affected,
and subject to fashion, such as one notices particularly in the young people of the
court. This affectation of speech and bearing is what generally makes the aspect of
the Frenchman repulsive and disagreeable to other nations. Instead of accentuating
his speech, his affected language insinuates his meaning. This is no way to
predispose others in his favor.
All the little defects of language that one is so afraid of letting children
contract are nothing. They can be prevented or corrected with the greatest ease.
But those that one causes children to contract by making their speech dull,
obscure, and timid, by incessantly criticizing their tone, by picking all their
words to pieces, are never corrected. A man who learns to speak only in his bedroom
will fail to make himself understood at the head of a battalion and will hardly
impress the
* This is not without exception; often the children who at first make themselves
understood least, later become the most deafening when they have begun to raise
their voices. But if I had to enter into all these minutiae, I would not finish.
Every sensible reader should see that the excess and the defect derived from the
same abuse are equally corrected by my method. I regard these two maxims as
inseparable: "Always enough," and "Never too much." When the first is well
established, the other follows necessarily.
[72]
BOOK I
people in a riot. First teach children to speak to men; they will know how to speak
to women when they have to.
Nursed in the country amidst all the pastoral rusticity, your children will get
more sonorous voices, they will not contract the obscure stuttering of city
children. Nor will they contract there either the expressions or the tone of the
village; or at least they will easily lose them when the master, living with them
from their birth, and doing so more exclusively every day, will, by the correctness
of his language, obviate or efface the impression of the peasants' language. Emile
will speak a French just as pure as I can know it, but he will speak it more
distinctly and will articulate it much better than I do.
The child who wants to speak should hear only words he can understand and say only
those he can articulate. The efforts he makes to do so cause him to reiterate the
same syllable as if to give himself practice in pronouncing it more distinctly.
When he begins to stammer, do not torment yourself so much to guess what he is
saying. To claim that one must always be heard is yet another kind of domination,
and the child should exercise none. Let it suffice you that you provide most
attentively for what is necessary. It is up to him to endeavor to make you
understand what is not. Still less must one be in a hurry to insist that he talk.
He will know how to talk well on his own to the extent that he comes to sense the
utility of it.
One observes, it is true, that those who begin to talk very late never speak so
distinctly as the others. But it is not because they talked late that their speech
remains impeded; it is, on the contrary, because they are born with a speech
impediment that they begin to talk late, for without that why would they talk later
than the others? Have they less occasion to talk, and are they less encouraged to
do so? On the contrary, the anxiety caused by this lateness, as soon as one becomes
aware of it, makes one torment oneself to make these children blurt out something
much more than one did with those who articulated earlier. And this ill-advised
fuss can contribute a great deal to making obscure their speech, which, with less
hurry, they would have had time to perfect more.
Children whom one hurries to talk have time neither to learn to pronounce well nor
to conceive well what they are made to say; while, when they are allowed to proceed
on their own, they practice first the easiest syllables to pronounce; and giving
these syllables little by little a meaning which can be understood from their
gestures, they give you their words before receiving yours. That done, they receive
yours only after having understood them; not being pressed to make use of them,
they begin by observing well what sense you give to them; and when they have made
sure of it, they adopt them.
The greatest harm from the hurry one is in to make children talk before the proper
age is not that the first speeches one makes to them and the first words they say
have no meaning for them, but that they have another meaning than ours without our
being able to perceive it; so that, appearing to answer us quite exactly, they
speak to us without understanding us and without our understanding them. It is
ordinarily due to such equivocations that we are sometimes surprised by their
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remarks, to which we lend ideas that they did not attach to them. This lack of
attention on our part to the true meaning which words have for children appears to
me to be the cause of their first errors; and these errors, even after they are
cured of them, have an influence on their turn of mind for the rest of their lives.
I shall have more than one occasion to clarify this by examples in what follows.
Restrict, therefore, the child's vocabulary as much as possible. It is a very great
disadvantage for him to have more words than ideas, for him to know how to say more
things than he can think. I believe one of the reasons why peasants generally have
clearer minds than city people is that their lexicon is less extensive. They have
few ideas, but they are very good at the comparison of ideas.
The first developments of childhood occur almost all at once. The child learns to
talk, to feed himself, to walk, at about the same time. This is, strictly speaking,
the first period of his life. Before it he is nothing more than he was in his
mother's womb. He has no sentiment, no idea; hardly does he have sensations. He
does not even sense his own existence.
Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae.* 34
End of the First Book
* Ovid Tristia I. 3. [74]
BOOK II
-A-HIS is the second period of life, and now infancy, strictly speaking, has ended.
For the words infans and puer are not synonymous. The former is contained in the
latter and signifies "one who cannot speak"; this is why puerum infantem is found
in Valerius Maximus.1 But I shall continue to use this word according to the usage
of our language until I reach an age for which it has another name.
When children begin to speak, they cry less. This is a natural progress. One
language is substituted for the other. As soon as they can say with words that they
are in pain, why would they say it with cries, except when the pain is too intense
for speech to express it? If they continue to cry then, it is the fault of the
people around them. As soon as Emile has once said, "It hurts," very intense pains
indeed will be needed to force him to cry.
If the child is delicate, sensitive, if naturally he starts crying for nothing, by
making his cries useless and ineffective, I will soon dry up their source. So long
as he cries, I do not go to him. I run as soon as he has stopped. Soon his way of
calling me will be to keep quiet or, at the most, to let out a single cry. It is by
the effect they sense their cries make that children judge their own senses. There
is no other convention for them. Whatever injury a child may do to himself, it is
very rare that he cries when he is alone, unless he hopes to be heard.
If he falls, if he bumps his head, if his nose bleeds, if he cuts his fingers,
instead of fussing around him as though I were alarmed, I will remain calm, at
least for a short time. The harm is done; it is a necessity that he endure it; all
my fussing would only serve to frighten him more and increase his sensitivity. At
bottom, it is less the blow than the fear which torments when one has been hurt. I
will at least spare him this latter anxiety, for quite certainly he will judge of
his injury as he sees me judge of it. If he sees me run in agitation to console and
pity him, he will consider himself lost. If he sees me keep my composure, he will
soon regain his and will believe the injury cured when he no longer feels it. It is
at this age that one gets the first lessons
M
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in courage, and that, bearing slight pains without terror, one gradually learns to
bear great pains.
Far from being attentive to protecting Emile from injury, I would be most
distressed if he were never hurt and grew up without knowing pain. To suffer is the
first thing he ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know. It seems
that children are little and weak only in order that they may get these important
lessons without danger. If the child falls down, he will not break his leg; if he
hits himself with a stick, he will not break his arm; if he grabs a knife, he will
hardly tighten his grip and will not cut himself very deeply. I do not know of a
child at liberty who was ever seen to kill, cripple, or do himself any considerable
harm, unless he was carelessly exposed on high places or alone near fire, or
dangerous instruments were left in his reach. What is to be said about these
arsenals of machines set up around a child to arm him at all points against pain,
so that when he is grown, he is at its mercy without courage and without
experience, believes he is dead at the first prick, and faints on seeing the first
drop of his blood?
Our didactic and pedantic craze is always to teach children what they would learn
much better by themselves and to forget what we alone could teach them. Is there
anything more foolish than the effort made to teach them to walk, as if anyone were
ever seen who, due to his nurse's negligence, did not when grown know how to walk?
How many people, on the contrary, does one see walk badly for their whole lives
because they were badly taught how to walk?
Emile will not have padded bonnets, strollers, buggies, or leading strings; or, at
least, as soon as he begins to know how to put one foot before the other, he will
be supported only in paved places, and we shall hastily pass them by.* Instead of
letting him stagnate in the stale air of a room, let him be taken daily to the
middle of a field. There let him run and frisk about; let him fall a hundred times
a day. So much the better. That way he will learn how to get up sooner. The well-
being of freedom makes up for many wounds. My pupil will often have bruises. But,
in compensation, he will always be gay. If your pupils have fewer bruises, they are
always hindered, always enchained, always sad. I doubt whether the advantage is
theirs.
Another progress makes complaint less necessary to children; this is the progress
of their strength. Able to do more by themselves, they need to have recourse to
others less frequently. With their strength develops the knowledge which puts them
in a condition to direct it. It is at this second stage that, strictly speaking,
the life of the individual begins. It is then that he gains consciousness of
himself. Memory extends the sentiment of identity to all the moments of his
existence; he becomes truly one, the same, and consequently already capable of
happiness or unhappiness. It is important, therefore, to begin to consider him here
as a moral being.
Although the furthest limit of human life can be pretty nearly de-
* There is nothing more ridiculous and more lacking in assurance than the step of
people who were led too much by leading strings when they were little. This is
another of those observations that are trivial by dint of being accurate and that
are accurate in more than one sense.
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termined, as well as one's probabilities at each age of approaching that limit,
nothing is more uncertain than the duration of each man's life in particular. Very
few attain this furthest limit. Life's greatest risks are in its beginnings; the
less one has lived, the less one ought to hope to live. Of the children born, half,
at the most, reach adolescence; and it is probable that your pupil will not reach
the age of manhood.2
What, then, must be thought of that barbarous education which sacrifices the
present to an uncertain future, which burdens a child with chains of every sort and
begins by making him miserable in order to prepare him from afar for I know not
what pretended happiness which it is to be believed he will never enjoy? Even if I
were to suppose this education reasonable in its object, how can one without
indignation see poor unfortunates submitted to an unbearable yoke and condemned to
continual labor like galley slaves, without any assurance that so many efforts will
ever be useful to them? The age of gaiety passes amidst tears, punishments,
threats, and slavery. The unlucky fellow is tormented for his own good; and the
death that is being summoned is unseen, the death which is going to seize him in
the midst of this gloomy setup. Who knows how many children perish victims of a
father's or a master's extravagant wisdom? Happy to escape his cruelty, the only
advantage they get from the ills he has made them suffer is to die without
regretting life, of which they knew only the torments.
Men, be humane. This is your first duty. Be humane with every station, every age,
everything which is not alien to man. What wisdom is there for you save humanity?
Love childhood; promote its games, its pleasures, its amiable instinct. Who among
you has not sometimes regretted that age when a laugh is always on the lips and the
soul is always at peace? Why do you want to deprive these little innocents of the
enjoyment of a time so short which escapes them and of a good so precious which
they do not know how to abuse? Why do you want to fill with bitterness and pains
these first years which go by so rapidly and can return no more for them than they
can for you? Fathers, do you know the moment when death awaits your children? Do
not prepare regrets for yourself in depriving them of the few instants nature gives
them. As soon as they can sense the pleasure of being, arrange it so that they can
enjoy it, arrange it so that at whatever hour God summons them they do not die
without having tasted life.
How many voices are going to be raised against me! I hear from afar the clamors of
that false wisdom which incessantly projects us outside of ourselves, which always
counts the present for nothing, and which, pursuing without respite a future that
retreats in proportion as we advance, by dint of transporting us where we are not,
transports us where we shall never be.
This is, you answer me, the time to correct man's bad inclinations; it is during
the age of childhood, when we are least sensitive to pains, that they must be
multiplied so as to spare them in the age of reason. But who tells you that this
whole arrangement is at your disposition, and that all this fair instruction with
which you overwhelm
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the child's feeble mind will not one day be more pernicious to him than useful? Who
assures you that you are sparing him something by the sorrows you lavish on him?
Why do you give him more ills than his condition entails without being sure that
these present ills are for the relief of the future? And how will you prove to me
that these bad inclinations, of which you claim you are curing him, do not come to
him from your ill-considered care far more than from nature? Unhappy foresight
which makes a being unhappy now in the hope, well or ill founded, of making him
happy one day! In case these vulgar reasoners confuse license with liberty and the
child one makes happy with the child one spoils, let us teach them to distinguish
the two.
In order not to pursue chimeras let us not forget what is appropriate to our
situation. Humanity has its place in the order of things; childhood has its in the
order of human life. The man must be considered in the man, and the child in the
child. To assign each his place and settle him in it, to order the human passions
according to man's constitution is all that we can do for his well-being. The rest
depends on alien causes which are in no way in our power.
We do not know what absolute happiness or unhappiness is. Everything is mixed in
this life; in it one tastes no pure sentiment; in it one does not stay two moments
in the same state. The affections of our souls, as well as the states of our
bodies, are in a continual flux. The good and the bad are common to us all, but in
different measures. The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the unhappiest
is he who feels the least pleasure. Always more suffering than enjoyment; this
relation between the two is common to all men. Man's felicity on earth is, hence,
only a negative condition; the smallest number of ills he can suffer ought to
constitute its measure.
Every feeling of pain is inseparable from the desire to be delivered from it; every
idea of pleasure is inseparable from the desire to enjoy it; every desire supposes
privation, and all sensed privations are painful. Our unhappiness consists,
therefore, in the disproportion between our desires and our faculties. A being
endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely
happy being.
In what, then, consists human wisdom or the road of true happiness? It is not
precisely in diminishing our desires, for if they were beneath our power, a part of
our faculties would remain idle, and we would not enjoy our whole being. Neither is
it in extending our faculties, for if, proportionate to them, our desires were more
extended, we would as a result only become unhappier. But it is in diminishing the
excess of the desires over the faculties and putting power and will in perfect
equality. It is only then that, with all the powers in action, the soul will
nevertheless remain peaceful and that man will be well ordered.
It is thus that nature, which does everything for the best, constituted him in the
beginning. It gives him with immediacy only the desires necessary to his
preservation and the faculties sufficient to satisfy them. It put all the others,
as it were, in reserve in the depth of his soul, to be developed there when needed.
Only in this original state are power and desire in equilibrium and man is not
unhappy. As soon as his potential faculties are put in action, imagination, the
most active of all, is
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BOOK II
awakened and outstrips them. It is imagination which extends for us the measure of
the possible, whether for good or bad, and which consequently excites and nourishes
the desires by the hope of satisfying them. But the object which at first appeared
to be at hand flees more quickly than it can be pursued. When one believes that one
has reached it, it transforms and reveals itself in the distance ahead of us. No
longer seeing the country we have already crossed, we count it for nothing; what
remains to cross ceaselessly grows and extends. Thus one exhausts oneself without
getting to the end, and the more one gains on enjoyment, the further happiness gets
from us.
On the contrary, the closer to his natural condition man has stayed, the smaller is
the difference between his faculties and his desires, and consequently the less
removed he is from being happy. He is never less unhappy than when he appears
entirely destitute, for unhappiness consists not in the privation of things but in
the need that is felt for them.
The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge
the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two
alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy. Take away strength,
health, and good witness of oneself, all the goods of this life are in opinion;
take away the pains of the body and the remorse of conscience, all our ills are
imaginary. This principle is common, it will be said. I agree. But its practical
application is not common, and we are dealing solely with practice here.
When it is said that man is weak, what is meant? This word weak indicates a
relation, a relation obtaining within the being to which one applies it. He whose
strength surpasses his needs, be he an insect or a worm, is a strong being. He
whose needs surpass his strength, be he an elephant or a lion, be he a conqueror or
a hero, be he a god, is a weak being. The rebellious angel who misapprehended his
nature was weaker than the happy mortal who lives in peace according to his nature.
Man is very strong when he is contented with being what he is; he is very weak when
he wants to raise himself above humanity. Therefore, do not fancy that in extending
your faculties you extend your strength. On the contrary, you diminish your
strength if your pride is extended farther than it. Let us measure the radius of
our sphere and stay in the center like the insect in the middle of his web; we
shall always be sufficient unto ourselves; and we shall not have to complain of our
weakness, for we shall never feel it.
All the animals have exactly the faculties necessary to preserve themselves. Man
alone has superfluous faculties. Is it not very strange that this superfluity
should be the instrument of his unhappiness? In every country the arms of a man are
worth more than his subsistence. If he were wise enough to count this superfluity
for nothing, he would always have what is necessary because he would never have
anything too much. The great needs, said Favorinus,* are born of great possessions;
and often the best way to provide oneself with the things one lacks is to give up
those that one has. It is by dint of agitating ourselves to increase our happiness
that we convert it into unhappiness. Any man
* Noct. attic. B. IX. c.8.s
[8l]
EMILE
who only wanted to live would live happily. Consequently he would live as a good
man, for what advantage would there be for him in being wicked?
If we were immortal, we would be most unhappy beings. It is hard to die doubtless;
but it is sweet to hope that one will not live forever, and that a better life will
end the pains of this one. If we were to be offered immortality on the earth, who
would want to accept this dreary present? 4 What resource, what hope, what
consolation would remain to us against the rigors of fate and the injustices of
men? The ignorant man, who foresees nothing, little senses the value of life and
little fears the loss of it; the enlightened man sees goods of a greater value
which he prefers to this good. It is only half knowledge and false wisdom which,
prolonging our views up to the point of death and not beyond, make it the worst of
evils for us. The necessity of dying is for the wise man only a reason for bearing
the pains of life. If one were not certain of losing life sometime, it would cost
too much to preserve.
Our moral ills are all matters of opinion, except for a single one— crime; and this
ill depends on us. Our physical ills are themselves destroyed or destroy us. Time
or death is our remedy. But we suffer more the less we know how to suffer; and we
give ourselves more torment in curing our maladies than we would have in enduring
them. Live according to nature, be patient, and drive away the doctors. You will
not avoid death, but you will feel it only once, while they bring it every day into
your troubled imagination; and their lying art, instead of prolonging your days,
deprives you of the enjoyment of them. I shall always ask what true good this art
has done for men. Some of those it cures would die, it is true, but the millions it
kills would remain alive. Man of sense, do not wager in this lottery where too many
chances are against you. Suffer, die, or get well; but, above all, live until your
last hour.
Everything is only folly and contradiction in human institutions. We worry about
our life more in proportion to its losing its value. Old men regret it more than
young people; they do not want to lose the preparations they have made for enjoying
it. At the age of sixty it is most cruel to die before having begun to live. It is
believed that man has an intense love for his own preservation, and that is true.
But it is not seen that this love, in the way in which we feel it, is in large part
the work of men. Naturally man worries about his preservation only insofar as the
means to it are in his power. As soon as these means escape him, he becomes calm
and dies without tormenting himself uselessly. The first law of resignation comes
to us from nature. Savages as well as beasts struggle very little against death and
endure it almost without complaint. When this law is destroyed, another one which
comes from reason takes shape; but few know how to derive it, and this artificial
resignation is never so full and complete as the primary one.
Foresight! Foresight, which takes us ceaselessly beyond ourselves and often places
us where we shall never arrive. This is the true source of all our miseries. What
madness for a fleeting being like man always to look far into a future which comes
so rarely and to neglect the present of which he is sure. It is a madness all the
more destructive since
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BOOK II
it increases continuously with age; and old men, always distrustful, full of
foresight, and miserly, prefer to deny themselves what is necessary today so as not
to lack it a hundred years from now. Thus, we are attached to everything, we cling
to everything—times, places, men, things; everything which is, everything which
will be, is important to each of us. Our individual persons are now only the least
part of ourselves. Each one extends himself, so to speak, over the whole earth and
becomes sensitive over this entire large surface. Is it surprising that our ills
are multiplied by all the points where we can be wounded? How many princes grieve
over the loss of a country they have never seen? How many merchants are there whom
it suffices to touch in India in order to make them scream in Paris?
Is it nature which thus carries men so far from themselves? Is it nature which
wants each to learn of his destiny from others and sometimes to be the last to
learn it? Thus, a man dies happy or miserable without ever knowing it. I see a man,
fresh, gay, vigorous, healthy, his presence inspires joy, his eyes proclaim
contentment, well-being; he brings with him the image of happiness. A letter comes
in the post; the happy man looks at it; it is addressed to him; he opens it, reads
it. Instantly his aspect changes. He becomes pale and faints. Coming to, he weeps,
writhes, moans, tears his hair, makes the air resound with his cries, seems to have
a frightful fit of convulsions. Senseless man, what ill has this piece of paper
done to you then? Of what limb has it deprived you? What crime has it made you
commit? Altogether, what has it changed in you yourself to put you in the state in
which I see you? r>
If the letter had gone astray, if a charitable hand had thrown it into the fire,
the fate of this mortal, happy and unhappy at once, would have been, it seems to
me, a strange problem. His unhappiness, you will say, was real. Very well, but he
did not feel it; where was it then? His happiness was imaginary. I understand.
Health, gaiety, well-being, contentment of mind are no longer anything but visions.
We no longer exist where we are; we only exist where we are not. Is it worth the
effort to have so great a fear of death if what we live off of remains?
O man, draw your existence up within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable.
Remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being. Nothing will
be able to make you leave it. Do not rebel against the hard law of necessity; and
do not exhaust your strength by your will to resist that law—strength which heaven
gave you not for extending or prolonging your existence but only for preserving it
as heaven pleases and for as long as heaven pleases. Your freedom and your power
extend only as far as your natural strength, and not beyond. All the rest is only
slavery, illusion, and deception. Even domination is servile when it is connected
with opinion, for you depend on the prejudices of those you govern by prejudices.
To lead them as you please, you must conduct yourself as they please. They have
only to change their way of thinking, and you must perforce change your way of
acting. Those who come near you have only to know how to govern the opinions of the
people whom you believe you govern, or of the favorites who govern you, or those of
your family, or your own. These
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viziers, courtiers, priests, soldiers, valets, babblers, and even babies— were you
a Themistocles in genius *—are going to lead you like a baby yourself in the very
midst of your legions. You can do what you like: never will your real authority go
farther than your real faculties. As soon as one must see with the eyes of others,
one must will with their wills. "My peoples are my subjects," you say proudly. So
be it. But you, what are you? The subject of your ministers; and your ministers, in
turn, what are they? The subjects of their clerks, their mistresses, the valets of
their valets. Take everything, usurp everything; and then pour out handfuls of
money, set up batteries of cannon, erect gallows and wheels, give laws and edicts,
multiply spies, soldiers, hangmen, prisons, chains. Poor little men, what does all
that do for you? You will be neither better served, nor less robbed, nor less
deceived, nor more absolute. You will always say, "We want," and you will always do
what others want.
The only one who does his own will is he who, in order to do it, has no need to put
another's arms at the end of his own; from which it follows that the first of all
goods is not authority but freedom. The truly free man wants only what he can do
and does what he pleases. That is my fundamental maxim. It need only be applied to
childhood for all the rules of education to flow from it.
Society has made man weaker not only in taking from him the right he had over his
own strength but, above all, in making his strength insufficient for him. That is
why his desires are multiplied along with his weakness, and that is what
constitutes the weakness of childhood compared to manhood. If the man is a strong
being and the child is a weak being, this is not because the former has more
strength absolutely than the latter, but it is because the former can naturally be
sufficient unto himself and the latter cannot. The man should, hence, have more
will and the child more whim, a word by which I mean all desires which are not true
needs and which can only be satisfied with another's help.7
I have given the reason for this state of weakness. Nature provides for it by the
attachment of fathers and mothers; but this attachment can have its excess, its
defect, its abuses. Parents who live in the civil state transport their child into
it before the proper age. In giving him more needs than he has, they do not relieve
his weakness; they increase it. They increase it still more by exacting from him
what nature did not exact. They do so by subjecting to their will the bit of
strength which he has for serving his own, by changing into slavery on one side or
the other the reciprocal dependence in which his weakness keeps him and their
attachment keeps them.
The wise man knows how to stay in his place; but the child, who does not know his
place, would not be able to keep to it. Among us he is given a thousand exits by
which to leave it. It is for those who
* "This little boy that you see there," said Themistocles to his friends, "is the
master of Greece, for he governs his mother, his mother governs me, I govern the
Athenians, and the Athenians govern Greece."" O what little leaders would often be
found in the greatest empires, if from the prince one descended by degrees to the
first hand which secretly sets things in motion!
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BOOK II
govern him to keep him in his place, and this is not an easy task. He ought to be
neither beast nor man, but child. It is necessary that he feel his weakness and not
that he suffer from it. It is necessary that he be dependent and not that he obey.
It is necessary that he ask and not that he command. He is only subject to others
by virtue of his needs, and because they see better than he does what is useful to
him, what can contribute to, or be harmful to, his preservation. No one, not even
the father, has a right to command the child what is not for his good.
Before prejudices and human institutions have corrupted our natural inclinations,
the happiness of children, like that of men, consists in the use of their freedom.
But in the case of children this freedom is limited by their weakness. Whoever does
what he wants is happy if he is self-sufficient; this is the case of the man living
in the state of nature. Whoever does what he wants is not happy if his needs
surpass his strength; this is the case of the child in the same state. Children,
even in the state of nature, enjoy only an imperfect freedom, similar to that
enjoyed by men in the civil state.8 No longer able to do without others, each of us
becomes in this respect weak and miserable again. We were made to be men; laws and
society have plunged us once more into childhood. The rich, the nobles, the kings
are all children who, seeing that men are eager to relieve their misery, derive a
puerile vanity from that very fact and are very proud of care that one would not
give to them if they were grown men.
These considerations are important and serve to resolve all the contradictions of
the social system. There are two sorts of dependence: dependence on things, which
is from nature; dependence on men, which is from society. Dependence on things,
since it has no morality, is in no way detrimental to freedom and engenders no
vices. Dependence on men, since it is without order,* engenders all the vices, and
by it, master and slave are mutually corrupted. If there is any means of remedying
this ill in society, it is to substitute law for man and to arm the general wills
with a real strength superior to the action of every particular will. If the laws
of nations could, like those of nature, have an inflexibility that no human force
could ever conquer, dependence on men would then become dependence on things again;
in the republic all of the advantages of the natural state would be united with
those of the civil state, and freedom which keeps man exempt from vices would be
joined to morality which raises him to virtue.10
Keep the child in dependence only on things. You will have followed the order of
nature in the progress of his education. Never present to his undiscriminating will
anything but physical obstacles or punishments which stem from the actions
themselves and which he will recall on the proper occasion. Without forbidding him
to do harm, it suffices to prevent him from doing it. Experience or impotence alone
ought to take the place of law for him. Grant nothing to his desires because he
asks for it but because he needs it. Let him not know what obedience is when he
acts nor what dominion is when one acts for him. Let him sense his liberty equally
in his actions and yours. Add to the
* In my Principles of Political Right' it is demonstrated that no particular will
can be ordered in the social system.
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strength he lacks exactly as much as he needs in order to be free but not
imperious; do so in such a way that he receives your services as a sort of
humiliation and longs for the moment when he can do without them and have the honor
of serving himself.
Nature has, for strengthening the body and making it grow, means that ought never
be opposed. A child must not be constrained to stay when he wants to go nor to go
when he wants to stay. When children's wills are not spoiled by our fault, children
want nothing uselessly. They have to jump, run, and shout when they wish. All their
movements are needs of their constitution seeking to strengthen itself. But one
should distrust what they desire but are unable to do for themselves and others
have to do for them. Then true need, natural need, must be carefully distinguished
from the need which stems from nascent whim or from the need which comes only from
the superabundance of life of which I have spoken.11
I have already said what must be done when a child cries to have this or that. I
shall only add that as soon as he can ask by saying what he desires, and, to get it
more quickly or overcome a refusal, he supports his request with tears, it ought to
be irrevocably refused him. If need has made him speak, you ought to know it and do
immediately what he asks. But to cede anything to his tears is to incite him to
shed them, is to teach him to doubt your good will and to believe that importunity
can have more effect on you than benevolence. If he does not believe you are good,
soon he will be wicked; if he believes you are weak, soon he will be stubborn. It
is important always to grant at the first sign what one does not want to refuse. Do
not be prodigal with refusal, but revoke it never.
Guard, above all, against giving the child vain formulas of politeness which serve
at need as magic words for him to submit to his will everything which surrounds him
and to obtain instantly what he pleases. The fancy education of the rich never
fails to leave them politely imperious, by prescribing to them the terms they are
to use in order that no one dare resist them. Their children have neither the tones
nor the wiles of supplication; they are as arrogant when they beg as when they
command—indeed, even more so—since they are all the more sure of being obeyed. One
sees from the first that in their mouths "If you please" signifies "I please" and
that "I beg you" signifies "I order you." Admirable politeness which results only
in their changing the sense of words and never being able to speak other than in
the accents of dominion! As for me who am less afraid that Emile be coarse than
that he be arrogant, I much prefer him to beg by saying, "Do this!" than to command
by saying, "I beg you." It is not the term he uses which is important to me but
rather the meaning he gives to it.
There is an excess of rigor and an excess of indulgence, both equally to be
avoided. If you let children suffer, you expose their health, their life. You make
them miserable in the present. If by too much care you spare them every kind of
discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them; you make them delicate,
sensitive; you cause them to leave man's estate to which they will return one day
in spite of you. So as not to expose them to some ills of nature, you are the
artisan of those
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nature did not give them. You will tell me that I fall into the class of those bad
fathers whom I reproached with sacrificing children's happiness to the
consideration of a distant time which may never be.
Not at all, for the freedom I give my pupil amply compensates him for the slight
discomforts to which I leave him exposed. I see little rascals playing in the snow,
blue and numb with cold, hardly able to move their fingers. Nothing prevents them
from going to get warm; they will have none of it. If they were forced to do so,
they would feel the rigors of constraint a hundred times more than they feel those
of the cold. What then do you complain about? Shall I make your child miserable by
not exposing him to discomforts he wants to suffer? I act for his good in the
present moment by leaving him free; I act for his good in the future by arming him
against the ills he must bear. If he had the choice of being my pupil or yours, do
you think he would hesitate for an instant?
Can you conceive of some true happiness possible for any being outside of its
constitution? And is not wanting to exempt man from all the ills of his species
equally to make him quit his constitution? Yes, I maintain that to feel the great
goods he must know the little ills. Such is his nature. If the physical prospers,
the moral is corrupted. The man who did not know pain would know neither the
tenderness of humanity nor the sweetness of commiseration. His heart would be moved
by nothing. He would not be sociable; he would be a monster among his kind.
Do you know the surest means of making your child miserable? It is to accustom him
to getting everything; since his desires grow constantly due to the ease of
satisfying them, sooner or later powerlessness will force you, in spite of
yourself, to end up with a refusal. And this unaccustomed refusal will give him
more torment than being deprived of what he desires. First, he will want the cane
you are holding; soon he will want your watch; after that he will want the bird
flying by; he will want the star he sees shining; he will want everything he sees.
Without being God, how will you content him?
It is a disposition natural to man to regard everything in his power as his. In
this sense Hobbes's principle is true up to a certain point. Multiply not only our
desires but the means of satisfying them, and each will make himself the master of
everything.12 Hence, the child who has only to want in order to get believes
himself to be the owner of the universe; he regards all men as his slaves. When one
is finally forced to refuse him something, he, believing that at his command
everything is possible, takes this refusal for an act of rebellion. All reasons
given him at an age when he is incapable of reasoning are to his mind only
pretexts. He sees ill will everywhere. The feeling of an alleged injustice souring
his nature, he develops hatred toward everyone; and, without ever being grateful
for helpfulness, he is indignant at every opposition.
How could I conceive that a child thus dominated by anger and devoured by the most
irascible passions might ever be happy? Happy, he! He is a despot. He is at once
the most vile of slaves and the most miserable of creatures. I have seen children
raised in this way who
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EMILE
wanted that the house be turned over by a bump of the shoulder, that they be given
the weathercock they see on a steeple, that a marching regiment be stopped so that
the drums could be heard longer; who pierced the air with their cries, unwilling to
listen to anyone, as soon as there was a delay in their being obeyed. All hastened
vainly to oblige them. With their desires exacerbated by the ease of getting, they
were obstinate about impossible things and found everywhere only contradiction,
obstacles, efforts, pains. Always grumbling, always rebellious, always furious,
they spent their days in screaming, in complaining. Were those very fortunate
beings? Weakness and domination joined engender only folly and misery. Of two
spoiled children, one beats the table and the other has the sea whipped. They will
have to do a lot of whipping and beating before they will live contentedly.13
If these ideas of dominion and tyranny make them miserable already in their
childhood, what will it be when they grow up and their relations with other men
begin to extend and multiply? Accustomed to seeing everything give way before them,
what a surprise on entering into the world to feel that everything resists them and
to find themselves crushed by the weight of this universe they thought they moved
at their pleasure! Their insolent airs, their puerile vanity, attract to them only
mortification, disdain, and mockery. They drink affronts like water; cruel
experiences soon teach them that they know neither their situation nor their
strength. Not omnipotent, they believe they are impotent. So many unaccustomed
obstacles dishearten them; so much contempt debases them. They become cowardly,
fearful, and fawning and fall as far below themselves as they had previously been
raised above themselves.
Let us return to the primary rule. Nature has made children to be loved and helped,
but has it made them to be obeyed and feared? Has it given them an imposing air, a
severe eye, a rough and threatening voice to make them dreaded? I understand that a
lion's roar scares animals and that they tremble on seeing his terrible head. But
if an indecent, odious, laughable spectacle has ever been seen, it is a body of
magistrates, in ceremonial robes and headed by its chief, prostrate before a child
in swaddling whom they harangue in stately terms and who screams and drools as his
only response.14
To consider childhood in itself, is there in the world a weaker being, a more
miserable one, one more at the mercy of everything surrounding him, who has a
greater need of pity, care, and protection, than a child? Does it not seem that he
presents so sweet a face and so touching a manner only so that all who come near
him will take an interest in his weakness and hasten to help him? What is there,
then, more shocking, more contrary to order than to see an imperious and rebellious
child command all that surrounds him and impudently take on the tone of a master
with those who have only to abandon him to make him perish?
On the other hand, who does not see that the weakness of the first age enchains
children in so many ways that it is barbarous to add to this subjection a further
subjection—that of our caprices—by taking from them a freedom so limited, which
they are so litle capable of abusing
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and the deprivation of which is of so little utility to them and to us? If there is
no object so worthy of ridicule as a haughty child, there is no object so worthy of
pity as a fearful child. Since with the age of reason civil servitude begins, why
anticipate it with private servitude? Let us suffer that a moment of life be exempt
from this yoke which nature did not impose on us, and leave to childhood the
exercise of natural freedom that keeps at a distance, for a time at least, vices
contracted in slavery. Let these severe teachers and these fathers subjugated by
their children both come, then, with their frivolous objections and, before
vaunting their methods, learn for once the method of nature.
I return to practice. I have already said that your child ought to get a thing not
because he asks for it but because he needs it,* and do a thing not out of
obedience but only out of necessity. Thus the words obey and command will be
proscribed from his lexicon, and even more so duty and obligation. But strength,
necessity, impotence, and constraint should play a great role in it. Before the age
of reason one cannot have any idea of moral beings or of social relations. Hence so
far as possible words which express them must be avoided, for fear that the child
in the beginning attach to these words false ideas which you will not know about or
will no longer be able to destroy. The first false idea which enters his head is
the germ in him of error and vice. It is to this first step above all that
attention must be paid. Arrange it so that as long as he is struck only by objects
of sense, all his ideas stop at sensations; arrange it so that on all sides he
perceive around him only the physical world. Without that, you may be sure that he
will not listen to you at all, or that he will get fantastic notions of the moral
world of which you speak to him, notions that you will never in your life be able
to blot out.
To reason with children was Locke's great maxim.15 It is the one most in vogue
today. Its success, however, does not appear to me such as to establish its
reputation; and, as for me, I see nothing more stupid than these children who have
been reasoned with so much. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is, so to
speak, only a composite of all the others, is the one that develops with the most
difficulty and latest. And it is this one which they want to use in order to
develop the first faculties! The masterpiece of a good education is to make a
reasonable man, and they claim they raise a child by reason! This is to begin with
the end, to want to make the product the instrument. If children understood reason,
they would not need to be raised. But by speaking to them from an early age a
language which they do not understand, one accustoms them to show off with words,
to control all that is said to them, to believe themselves as wise as their
masters, to become disputatious and rebellious; and everything that is thought to
be gotten from them out of reasonable motives is never obtained other than out of
* It ought to be sensed that just as pain is often a necessity, pleasure is
sometimes a need. There is, therefore, only one single desire of children which
ought never be satisfied: that of being obeyed. From this it follows that in
everything they ask for, attention must above all be paid to the motive which leads
them to ask for it. So, as far as possible, grant them everything that can give
them a real pleasure; always refuse them what they ask for only due to whim or in
order to assert their authority.
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EMILE
motives of covetousness or fear or vanity which are always perforce joined to the
others.
This is the formula to which all the lessons in morality that are given, and can be
given, to children can just about be reduced:
master You must not do that.
child And why must I not do it?
master Because it is bad to do.
child Bad to do! What is bad to do?
master What you are forbidden to do.
child What is bad about doing what I am forbidden to do?
master You are punished for having disobeyed.
child I shall fix it so that nothing is known about it.
master You will be spied on.
child I shall hide.
master You will be questioned.
child I shall lie.
master You must not he.
child Why must I not lie?
master Because it is bad to do, etc.
This is the inevitable circle. Get out of it, and the child does not understand you
any longer. Is this not most useful instruction? I would be quite curious to know
what could be put in the place of this dialogue. Locke himself would certainly have
been very much at a loss. To know good and bad, to sense the reason for man's
duties, is not a child's affair.
Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this
order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and
will not be long in rotting. We shall have young doctors10 and old children.
Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it.
Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs, and I would
like as little to insist that a ten-year-old be five feet tall as that he possess
judgment. Actually, what would reason do for him at that age? It is the bridle of
strength, and the child does not need this bridle.
In trying to persuade your pupils of the duty of obedience, you join to this
alleged persuasion force and threats or, what is worse, flattery and promises. In
this way, therefore, lured by profit or constrained by force, they pretend to be
convinced by reason. They see quite well that obedience is advantageous to them and
rebellion harmful when you notice either. But since everything you insist on is
unpleasant and, further, it is always irksome to do another's will, they arrange to
do their own will covertly. They are persuaded that what they do is right if their
disobedience is unknown, but are ready on being caught—in order to avoid a worse
evil—to admit that what they do is wrong. Since the reason for duty cannot be
grasped at their age, there is not a man in the world who could succeed in giving
duty a truly palpable sense for them. But the fear of punishment, the hope of
pardon, importunity, awkwardness in answering, wrest all the confessions from them
that
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BOOK II
are demanded; and it is believed that they have been convinced when they have only
been pestered or intimidated.
What results from this? Firstly, by imposing on them a duty they do not feel, you
set them against your tyranny and turn them away from loving you. Secondly, you
teach them to become dissemblers, fakers, and liars in order to extort rewards or
escape punishments. Finally, by accustoming them always to cover a secret motive
with an apparent motive, you yourselves give them the means of deceiving you
ceaselessly, of depriving you of the knowledge of their true character, and of
fobbing you and others off with vain words when the occasion serves. Laws, you will
say, although they obligate conscience, nevertheless also use constraint with grown
men. I admit it, but what are these men if not children spoiled by education? This
is precisely what must be prevented. Use force with children, and reason with men.
Such is the natural order. The wise man does not need laws.
Treat your pupil according to his age. At the outset put him in his place, and hold
him there so well that he no longer tries to leave it. Then, before knowing what
wisdom is, he will practice its most important lesson. Command him nothing,
whatever in the world it might be, absolutely nothing. Do not even allow him to
imagine that you might pretend to have any authority over him. Let him know only
that he is weak and you are strong, that by his condition and yours he is
necessarily at your mercy. Let him know it, learn it, feel it. Let his haughty head
at an early date feel the harsh yoke which nature imposes on man, the heavy yoke of
necessity under which every finite being must bend. Let him see this necessity in
things, never in the caprice* of men. Let the bridle that restrains him be force
and not authority. Do not forbid him to do that from which he should abstain;
prevent him from doing it without explanations, without reasonings. What you grant
him, grant at his first word, without solicitations, without prayers—above all,
without conditions. Grant with pleasure; refuse only with repugnance. But let all
your refusals be irrevocable; let no importunity shake you; let "no," once
pronounced, be a wall of bronze against which the child will have to exhaust his
strength at most five or six times in order to abandon any further attempts to
overturn it.
It is thus that you will make him patient, steady, resigned, calm, even when he has
not got what he wanted, for it is in the nature of man to endure patiently the
necessity of things but not the ill will of others. The phrase "There is no more"
is a response against which no child has ever rebelled unless he believed that it
was a he. Besides, there is no middle point here: nothing must be demanded from him
at all, or he must be bent from the outset to the most perfect obedience. The worst
education is to leave him floating between his will and yours and to dispute
endlessly between you and him as to which of the two will be the master. I would a
hundred times prefer that it were always he.
It is quite strange that since people first became involved with raising children,
no instrument for guiding them has been imagined
* One should be sure that the child will treat as a caprice every will opposed to
his own when he does not appreciate the reason for it. Now a child does not
appreciate the reason for anything which clashes with his whims.
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EMILE
other than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, avidity, and vile fear—all the most
dangerous passions, the quickest to ferment and the most appropriate to corrupt the
soul, even before the body has been formed. With each lesson that one wants to put
into their heads before its proper time, a vice is planted in the depth of their
hearts. Senseless teachers think they work wonders when they make children wicked
in order to teach them what goodness is. And then they solemnly tell us, "Such is
man." Yes, such is the man you have made.
All the instruments have been tried save one, the only one precisely that can
succeed: well-regulated freedom. One ought not to get involved with raising a child
if one does not know how to guide him where one wants by the laws of the possible
and the impossible alone. The sphere of both being equally unknown to him, they can
be expanded and contracted around him as one wants. One enchains, pushes, and
restrains him with the bond of necessity alone without his letting out a peep. He
is made supple and docile by the force of things alone without any vice having the
occasion to germinate in him, for the passions never become animated so long as
they are of no effect.
Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lessons; he ought to receive them only
from experience. Inflict no kind of punishment on him, for he does not know what it
is to be at fault. Never make him beg pardon, for he could not know how to offend
you. Devoid of all morality in his actions, he can do nothing which is morally bad
and which merits either punishment or reprimand.
I already see the startled reader judging this child by our children. He is
mistaken. The perpetual constraint in which you keep your pupils exacerbates their
vivacity. The more they are held in check under your eyes, the more they are
turbulent the moment they get away. They have to compensate themselves when they
can for the harsh constraint in which you keep them. Two schoolboys from the city
will do more damage in a place than the young of an entire village. Close up a
little gentleman and a little peasant in a room. The former will have turned
everything upside down, broken everything, before the latter has left his place.
Why is this, if it is not because the one hastens to abuse a moment of license,
while the other, always sure of his freedom, is never in a hurry to make use of it?
And nevertheless the children of the village people, themselves often indulged or
opposed, are still quite far from the state in which I want them kept.
Let us set down as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are
always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a
single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered.
The sole passion natural to man is amour de soi or amour-propre taken in an
extended sense.17 This amour-propre in itself or relative to us is good and useful;
and since it has no necessary relation to others, it is in this respect naturally
neutral. It becomes good or bad only by the application made of it and the
relations given to it. Therefore, up to the time when the guide of amour-propre,
which is reason, can be born, it is important for a child to do nothing because he
is seen or heard—nothing, in a word, in relation to
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BOOK II
others; he must respond only to what nature asks of him, and then he will do
nothing but good.
I do not mean that he will never do damage, that he will not hurt himself, that he
will not perhaps break a valuable piece of furniture if he finds it in his reach.
He could do a considerable amount of wrong without wrongdoing, because the bad
action depends on the intention of doing harm, and he will never have this
intention. If he had it one single time, all would be lost already; he would be
wicked almost beyond recall.
Some things are bad in the eyes of avarice which are not so in the eyes of reason.
In leaving children full freedom to exercise their giddiness, it is proper to put
away from them everything that could make it costly and to leave nothing fragile
and precious within their reach. Let their quarters be fitted with coarse and solid
furniture, no mirrors, no china, no objects of quality. As for my Emile, whom I am
raising in the country, his room will have nothing which distinguishes it from a
peasant's. What is the use of decorating it so carefully, since he is going to stay
in it so little? But I am mistaken. He will decorate it himself, and we shall soon
see with what.
If in spite of your precautions, the child succeeds in creating some disorder, in
breaking some useful piece, do not punish him for your negligence; do not chide
him; let him hear not a single word of reproach; do not permit him even to glimpse
that he has brought you grief; act exactly as if the thing had been broken of
itself. In short, believe you have accomplished a lot if you can say nothing.
Dare I expose the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all
education?flt is not to gain time but to lose i£TCommon readers, pardon me my
paradoxes. When one reflects, they are necessary and, whatever you may say, I
prefer to be a paradoxical man than a prejudiced one.18 The most dangerous period
of human life is that from birth to the age of twelve. This is the time when errors
and vices germinate without one's yet having any instrument for destroying them;
and by the time the instrument comes, the roots are so deep that it is too late to
rip them out. If children jumped all at once from the breast to the age of reason,
the education they are given might be suitable for them. But, according to the
natural progress, they need an entirely contrary one. They ought to do nothing with
their soul until all of its faculties have developed, because while the soul is yet
blind, it cannot perceive the torch you are presenting to it or follow the path
reason maps out across the vast plain of ideas, a path which is so faint even to
the best of eyes.
Thus, the first education ought to be purely negative. It consists not at all in
teaching virtue or truth but in securing the heart from vice and the mind from
error. If you could do nothing and let nothing be done, if you could bring your
pupil healthy and robust to the age of twelve without his knowing how to
distinguish his right hand from his left, at your first lessons the eyes of his
understanding would open up to reason. Without prejudice, without habit, he would
have nothing in him which could hinder the effect of your care. Soon he would
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EMILE
become in your hands the wisest of men; and in beginning by doing nothing, you
would have worked an educational marvel.
Take the opposite of the practiced path, and you will almost always do well. Since
what is wanted is not to make a child out of a child but a doctor out of a child,
fathers and masters can never soon enough scold, correct, reprimand, flatter,
threaten, promise, instruct, talk reason. Do better: be reasonable, and do not
reason with your pupil, especially to get his approbation for what displeases him.
Bringing reason to bear on unpleasant things only makes reason tedious for him and
discredits it early in a mind not yet in a condition to understand it. Exercise his
body, his organs, his senses, his strength, but keep his soul idle for as long as
possible. Be afraid of all sentiments anterior to the judgment which evaluates
them. Restrain, arrest alien impressions; and in order to prevent the birth of
evil, do not hurry to do good, for good is only truly such when reason enlightens
it. Regard all delays as advantages; to advance toward the end without losing
anything is to gain a lot. Let childhood ripen in children. And what if some lesson
finally becomes necessary to them? Keep yourself from giving it today if you can
without danger put it off until tomorrow.
Another consideration confirms the utility of this method. One must know well the
particular genius of the child in order to know what moral diet suits him. Each
mind has its own form, according to which it needs to be governed; the success of
one's care depends on governing it by this form and not by another. Prudent man,
spy out nature for a long time; observe your pupil well before saying the first
word to him. To start with, let the germ of his character reveal itself freely;
constrain it in no way whatsoever in order better to see the whole of it. Do you
think this time of freedom is lost for him? Not at all. This is the best way to use
it, for you are learning now not to lose a single moment in a more valuable time;
while if you begin to act before knowing what must be done, you will act
haphazardly. Subject to error, you will have to retrace your steps; you will be
farther removed from the goal than if you had been in less of a rush to reach it.
Do not therefore act like the miser who loses a great deal for wanting not to lose
anything. In the earliest age sacrifice time that you will regain with interest at
a more advanced age. The wise doctor does not at first sight giddily give
prescriptions but in the first place studies the constitution of his patient before
prescribing anything to him. He may begin to treat the patient late but he cures
him, whereas the doctor who is in too much of a rush kills him.
But where will we put this child to raise him like a being without sensation, like
an automaton? Will we keep him in the moon's orb or on a desert island? Will we
keep him away from all human beings? Will he not constantly have in the world the
spectacle and the example of others' passions? Will he never see other children of
his age? Will he not see his parents, his neighbors, his nurse, his governess, his
lackey, even his governor who, after all, will not be an angel?
This objection is strong and solid. But did I tell you that a natural education was
an easy undertaking? O men, is it my fault if you have made everything good
difficult? I sense these difficulties; I agree that
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BOOK II
they are difficulties. Perhaps they are insurmountable. But it is still certain
that in applying oneself to overcoming them, one does overcome them up to a certain
point. I show the goal that must be set; I do not say that it can be reached. But I
do say that he who comes nearest to it will have succeeded best.
Remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must have made
oneself a man. One must find within oneself the example the pupil ought to take for
his own. While the child is still without knowledge, there is time to prepare
everything that comes near him in order that only objects suitable for him to see
meet his first glances. Make yourself respectable to everyone. Begin by making
yourself loved so that each will seek to please you. You will not be the child's
master if you are not the master of all that surrounds him; and this authority will
never be sufficient if it is not founded on the esteem for virtue. It is not a
question of emptying one's purse and spending money by the handful. I have never
seen that money has made anyone loved. One ought not to be miserly and hard nor
merely pity the poverty that one can relieve. But you can open your coffers all you
want; if you do not also open your heart, others' hearts will always remain closed
to you. It is your time, your care, your affection, it is you yourself that must be
given. For no matter what you do, people never feel that your money is you. There
are tokens of interest and benevolence which produce a greater effect and are
really more useful than any gifts. How many unfortunate people, how many sick
people need consolation more than alms! How many oppressed people need protection
more than money! Reconcile people who have quarreled; forestall litigations; bring
children to their duty, fathers to indulgence; encourage happy marriages; prevent
harassment; use, lavish the influence of your pupil's parents in favor of the weak
man to whom justice is denied and who is crushed by the powerful man. Loudly
proclaim yourself the protector of the unfortunate. Be just, humane, and
beneficent. Give not only alms; give charity. Works of mercy relieve more ills than
does money. Love others, and they will love you. Serve them, and they will serve
you. Be their brother, and they will be your children.
This is again one of the reasons why I want to raise Emile in the country far from
the rabble of valets—who are, after their masters, the lowest of men—far from the
black morals of cities which are covered with a veneer seductive and contagious for
children, unlike peasants' vices which, unadorned and in all their coarseness, are
more fit to repel than to seduce when there is no advantage in imitating them.
In a village a governor will be much more the master of the objects he wants to
present the child. His reputation, his speeches, and his example will have an
authority which they could not have in the city. Since he is useful to everyone,
all will be eager to oblige him, to be esteemed by him, to show themselves to the
disciple as the master would want them really to be. And if they do not actually
reform, they will at least abstain from scandal; this is all we need for our
project.
Stop blaming others for your own faults; the evil children see corrupts them less
than that which you teach them. Always sermonizers, always moralists, always
pedants, for one idea you give them, believing it
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EMILE
to be good, you give them at the same time twenty that are worthless. Full of what
is going on in your head, you do not see the effect you are producing in theirs. In
this long stream of words with which you constantly exasperate them, do you think
there is not one which they misapprehend? Do you think that they do not make their
own commentaries on your diffuse explanations, and that they do not find in these
explanations the material for setting up a system on their own level, which they
will know how to use against you when the occasion demands?
Listen to a little fellow who has just been indoctrinated. Let him chatter,
question, utter foolishness at his ease, and you are going to be surprised at the
strange turn your reasonings have taken in his mind. He mixes up everything, turns
everything upside down; he makes you lose your patience, sometimes grieves you by
unforeseen objections. He reduces you to silence or to silencing him, and what can
he think of this silence on the part of a man who likes to talk so much? If ever he
gains this advantage and notices it, farewell to education. Everything is finished
from this moment: he no longer seeks to learn; he seeks to refute you.
Zealous masters, be simple, discreet, restrained; never hasten to act except to
prevent others from acting. I shall repeat it endlessly: put off, if possible, a
good lesson for fear of giving a bad one. On this earth, out of which nature has
made man's first paradise, dread exercising the tempter's function in wanting to
give innocence the knowledge of good and evil. Unable to prevent the child's
learning from examples out of doors, limit your vigilance to impressing these
examples upon his mind accompanied by the images suitable for him.
Impetuous passions produce a great effect on the child who is witness to them
because their manifestations are such as to strike his senses and force him to pay
attention. Anger, in particular, is so noisy in its transports that one cannot fail
to notice it if one is within its range. It need not be asked whether this is the
occasion for a pedagogue to start out on a fine speech. Now, no fine speeches!
Nothing at all; not a single word. Let the child come; surprised at the spectacle,
he will not fail to question you. The response is simple; it is drawn from the very
objects which strike his senses. He sees an inflamed face, glittering eyes,
threatening gestures; he hears shouts—all signs that the body is out of kilter.
Tell him calmly, without affectation and without mystery, "This poor man is sick;
he is in a fit of fever." On this basis you can find occasions to give him, but in
a few words, an idea of illnesses and their effects, for that, too, belongs to
nature and is one of the bonds of necessity to which he should feel himself
subjected.19
Is it possible that from this idea, which is not false, he will not early on
contract a certain repugnance to abandoning himself to the excesses of the
passions, which he will regard as diseases? And do you believe that some such
notion, given apropos, will not produce an effect as salutary as the most boring
moral sermon? Moreover, just consider the future ramifications of this notion! Now
you are authorized, if you are ever forced to do so, to treat a rebellious child as
a sick child, to shut him up in his room, in his bed if necessary, to keep him on a
diet,
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to frighten him with his own nascent vices, to render them odious and redoubtable
to him, without his ever being able to regard as a chastisement the severity you
will perhaps be forced to use to cure him of them. If it should happen that you
yourself, in a moment of heat, lose that coolness and moderation which you should
make your study, do not seek to disguise your mistake before him, but tell him
frankly with a tender reproach, "My friend, you hurt me."
Furthermore, it is important that none of a child's naive statements— the products
of the simplicity of the ideas on which he feeds—ever be picked up in his presence
or quoted in such a way that he can learn of it. An indiscreet outburst of laughter
can ruin the work of six months and do irreparable harm for the whole of life. I
cannot repeat often enough that to be the child's master one must be one's own
master. I see my little Emile, at the height of a fracas between two neighbors,
approaching the more furious of the two and saying to her in a tone of
commiseration, "My good woman, you are sick. I am so sorry about it." This sally
will surely not remain without effect on the spectators or perhaps on the
actresses. Without laughing, without scolding him, without praising him, I take him
away willingly or forcibly before he can see this effect, or at least before he
thinks about it, and I hasten to distract him with other objects which make him
forget it right away.
It is my design not to enter into all the details but only to expound the general
maxims and to give examples for difficult occasions. I hold it to be impossible to
bring a child along to the age of twelve in the bosom of society without giving him
some idea of the relations of man to man and of the morality of human actions. It
is enough if one takes pains to ensure that these notions become necessary to him
as late as possible and, when their presentation is unavoidable, to limit them to
immediate utility, with the sole intention of preventing him from believing himself
master of everything and from doing harm to others without scruple and without
knowing it. There are gentle and quiet characters whom one can take a long way in
their first innocence without danger. But there are also violent natures whose
ferocity develops early and whom one must hasten to make into men so as not to be
obliged to put them in chains.
Our first duties are to ourselves; our primary sentiments are centered on
ourselves; all our natural movements relate in the first instance to our
preservation and our well-being. Thus, the first sentiment of justice does not come
to us from the justice we owe but from that which is owed us; and it is again one
of the mistakes of ordinary educations that, speaking at first to children of their
duties, never of their rights, one begins by telling them the opposite of what is
necessary, what they cannot understand, and what cannot interest them.20
If, therefore, I had to guide one of those children I just mentioned, I would say
to myself, "A child does not attack persons * but things; and
* One ought never to permit a child to play with grownups as with his inferiors or
even as with his equals. If he seriously dares to strike someone, be it his lackey,
be it the hangman, arrange that his blows be always returned with interest and in
such a way as to destroy the desire to revert to the practice. I have seen
imprudent governesses animate the unruliness of a child, incite him to strike, let
themselves be
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EMILE
soon he learns by experience to respect whoever surpasses him in age and strength.
But things do not defend themselves. The first idea which must be given him is
therefore less that of liberty than that of property; and for him to be able to
have this idea, he must have something that belongs to him. To mention to him his
clothing, his furniture, his toys, is to say nothing to him, since, although he
disposes of these things, he knows neither why nor how he came by them. To say to
him that he has them because they were given to him is hardly to do better, for, in
order to give, one must have. Here is, therefore, a property anterior to his, and
it is the principle of property one wants to explain to him, not to mention that a
gift is a convention and that the child cannot know yet what convention is." *
Readers, in this example and in a hundred thousand others, I beg you to note how we
stuff children's heads with words which have no meaning within their reach and then
believe we have instructed them very well.
The thing to do therefore is to go back to the origin of property, for it is there
that the first idea of it ought to be born. The child, living in the country, will
have gotten some notion of labor in the fields. For this only eyes and leisure are
necessary; he will have both. It belongs to every age, especially his, to want to
create, imitate, produce, give signs of power and activity. It will not take two
experiences of seeing a garden plowed, sowed, sprouting, and growing vegetables for
him to want to garden in his turn.
According to the principles previously established, I in no way oppose his desire.
On the contrary, I encourage it, I share his taste. I work with him, not for his
pleasure, but for mine; at least he believes it to be so. I become his gardener's
helper. Until he has arms I plow the earth for him. He takes possession of it by
planting a bean in it. And surely this possession is more sacred and more
respectable than that taken of South America when Nunez Balboa in the name of the
King of Spain planted his standard on the shore of the South Sea.
We come every day to water the beans; with transports of joy we see them sprout. I
increase this joy by saying to him: "This belongs to you." And then, explaining to
him this term "belong," I make him feel that he has put his time, his labor, his
effort, finally his person there; that there is in this earth something of himself
that he can claim against anyone whomsoever, just as he could withdraw his arm from
the hand of another man who wanted to hold on to it in spite of him.-1
One fine day he arrives eagerly with the watering can in his hand. O what a sight!
O pain! All the beans are rooted out, the plot is torn up, the very spot is not to
be recognized. O, what has become of my labor, my product, the sweet fruit of my
care and my sweat? Who has stolen my goods? Who took my beans from me? This young
heart is
struck, and laugh at his feeble blows, without thinking that in the intention of
the little enraged one these blows were so many murders and that he who wants to
strike when young will want to kill when grown.
* This is why most children want to have back what they have given and cry when one
does not want to return it to them. This no longer occurs when they have gotten a
good conception of what a gift is, but then they are more circumspect about giving.
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aroused. The first sentiment of injustice comes to shed its sad bitterness in it.
Tears flow in streams. The grieving child fills the air with moans and cries. I
partake of his pain, his indignation. We look; we investigate; we make searches.22
Finally we discover that the gardener did the deed. He is summoned.
But we certainly do not get what we expect. The gardener, learning what we are
complaining about, begins to complain more loudly than we do. "What, sirs! Is it
you who have thus ruined my work? I had sowed Maltese melons there, the seeds of
which had been given me as a treasure and with which I hoped to regale you when
they were ripe. But now, in order to plant your miserable beans there, you
destroyed my melons for me when they were already sprouting, and they can never be
replaced. You have done me an irreparable wrong, and you have deprived yourselves
of the pleasure of eating exquisite melons."
jean-jacques Excuse us, my poor Robert. You had put your labor, your effort there.
I see clearly that we did wrong in ruining your work. But we will have other
Maltese seeds sent to you. And we will never again work the land before knowing
whether someone has put his hand to it before us.
Robert Very well, sirs! You can then take your rest. There is hardly any fallow
land left. I work what my father improved. Each in turn does the same, and all the
lands you see have been occupied for a long time.
emile Monsieur Robert, are melon seeds often lost then?
Robert Pardon me, my young fellow, but little gentlemen as giddy as you do not
often come our way. No one touches his neighbor's garden. Each respects the labor
of others so that his own will be secure.
emile But I don't have a garden.
Robert What do I care? If you ruin mine, I won't let you go around in it any more,
for, you see, I don't want to waste my effort.
jean-jacques Couldn't we propose an arrangement with the good Robert? Let him grant
us, my little friend and me, a corner of his garden to cultivate on the condition
that he will have half the produce.
robert I grant it to you without condition. But remember that I will go and plow up
your beans if you touch my melons.
In this model of the way of inculcating primary notions in children one sees how
the idea of property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant by
labor. That is clear, distinct, simple, and within the child's reach. From there to
the right of property and to exchange there is only a step, after which one must
simply stop short.
One sees further that an explanation that I enclose here in two pages of writing
will perhaps take a year to put into practice, for in the career of moral ideas one
cannot advance too slowly nor consolidate oneself too well at each step. Young
masters, think, I beg you, about this example, and remember that in everything your
lessons ought to
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EMILE
be more in actions than in speeches; for children easily forget what they have said
and what has been said to them, but not what they have done and what has been done
to them.
Instruction of the kind ought, as I have said, to be given sooner or later as the
peaceful or turbulent nature of the pupil accelerates or delays the need. How it
should be given is obvious; but so as to leave out nothing of importance in
difficult matters, let us give yet another example.
Your ill-tempered child ruins everything he touches. Do not get angry; put what he
can damage out of his reach. He breaks the furniture he uses. Do not hurry to
replace it for him. Let him feel the disadvantage of being deprived of it. He
breaks the windows of his room; let the wind blow on him night and day without
worrying about colds, for it is better that he have a cold than that he be crazy.
Never complain about the inconveniences he causes you, but make him be the one to
feel those inconveniences first. Finally, you have the windows repaired, continuing
to say nothing about it. He breaks them again. Then change method. Tell him curtly
but without anger, "The windows are mine; they were put there by my efforts; I want
to protect them." Then you will close him up in darkness in a place without
windows. In response to such a new procedure he begins by crying and ranting. No
one listens to him. Soon he tires and changes tone. He moans and groans. A domestic
turns up; the rebel begs him for deliverance. Without seeking pretexts for not
doing it, the domestic responds, "I too have windows to protect," and leaves.
Finally, after the child has remained there several hours, long enough to get bored
and to remember it, someone will suggest to him that he propose an agreement by
means of which you will give him back his freedom if he no longer breaks windows.
He will not ask for better. He will have you asked to come and see him. You will
come. He will make you his proposition, and you will accept it on the instant,
saying to him, "That is very well thought out; we will both be gainers by it. Why
didn't you have this good idea sooner?" And then, without asking that he declare or
confirm his promise, you will embrace him with joy and take him to his room right
away, regarding this agreement as sacred and inviolable as if an oath had been
given on it. What idea do you think he will get from this procedure about the faith
of commitments and their utility? I am mistaken if there is a single child on
earth, not already spoiled, who would be proof against this conduct and take it
into his head after that to break a window intentionally.* Follow all the links of
this chain. The naughty
* Moreover, if this duty to keep commitments were not consolidated in the child's
mind by the weight of its utility, soon the inner sentiment, beginning to sprout,
would impose it on him like a law of conscience, like an innate principle which
awaits in order to bloom only the kinds of knowledge to which it applies. This
first sketch is not drawn by the hand of man but is graven in our hearts by the
Author of all justice. Take away the primary law of conventions and the obligation
it imposes, and everything is illusory and vain in human society. He who keeps his
promise only for profit is hardly more bound than if he had promised nothing, or,
at most, he is in the position to violate it like the tennis players who put off
using a bisque z3 only in order to wait for the moment to use it most
advantageously. This principle is of the utmost importance and merits deeper study.
For it is here that man begins to set himself in contradiction to himself.
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BOOK II
child hardly dreamed, while making a hole for planting his bean, that he was
digging for himself a dungeon where his science would not be long in shutting him
up.
Here we are in the moral world; here the door on vice opens. With conventions and
duties are born deceit and lying. As soon as one can do what one ought not, one
wants to hide what one ought not to have done. As soon as an interest causes a
promise, a greater interest can cause the violation of the promise. The only
concern now is to violate it with impunity. The means are natural; one conceals and
one lies. Not having been able to forestall vice, we are now already reduced to
punishing it. Here are the miseries of human life which begin with its errors.
I have said enough to make it understood that punishment as punishment must never
be inflicted on children, but it should always happen to them as a natural
consequence of their bad action. Thus you will not declaim against lying; you will
not precisely punish them for having lied; but you will arrange it so that all the
bad effects of lying—such as not being believed when one tells the truth, of being
accused of the evil that one did not do although one denies it—come in league
against them when they have lied. But let us explain what lying is for children.
There are two sorts of lies: the de facto lie, which is with respect to the past;
the de jure, which is with respect to the future. The former takes place when one
denies having done what one has done, or when one affirms having done what one has
not done, and in general when one knowingly speaks contrary to the truth of things.
The other takes place when one makes a promise that one does not plan to keep, and,
in general, when one gives evidence of an intention contrary to the intention one
has. These two lies can sometimes be joined in a single one,* but I am considering
them here under the aspect of their difference.
He who is aware of the need he has of others' help, and who never fails to
experience their benevolence, has no interest in deceiving them; on the contrary,
he has a palpable interest in their seeing things as they are, for fear that they
might make a mistake prejudicial to him. It is, therefore, clear that the de facto
lie is not natural to children. But it is the law of obedience which produces the
necessity of lying, because since obedience is irksome, it is secretly dispensed
with as much as possible, and the present interest in avoiding punishment or
reproach wins out over the distant interest of revealing the truth. In the natural
and free education why would your child lie to you? What has he to hide from you?
You do not reprove him; you punish him for nothing; you exact nothing from him. Why
would he not tell you everything he has done as naively as he would his little
comrade? He can see in this admission no more danger from one direction than the
other.
The de jure lie is still less natural, since promises to do or to forbear are
conventional acts which depart from the state of nature and impair freedom. What is
more, all commitments of children are in themselves null, because, since their
limited view cannot extend beyond the present,
* Such as, when accused of a bad action, the guilty party defends himself by
claiming he is an honest man. His lie is then de facto and de jure.
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EMILE
in committing themselves they do not know what they are doing. The child hardly can
lie when he commits himself; for, thinking only how to get through a situation at
the present moment, every means which does not have a present effect becomes the
same for him. In promising for a future time, he promises nothing, and his
imagination, still dormant, does not know how to extend his being over two
different times. If he could avoid the whip or get a bag of sugared almonds by
promising to throw himself out of the window tomorrow, he would make the promise on
the spot. This is why laws take no account of children's commitments; and when,
more severe, fathers and masters exact their fulfillment, it is only in those
things the child ought to do even if he had not promised.
Since the child does not know what he is doing when he commits himself, then he
cannot lie in committing himself. It is not the same when he breaks his promise,
which is now a kind of retroactive lie, for he remembers very well having made this
promise; but what he does not see is the importance of keeping it. Not in a
condition to read the future, he cannot foresee the consequences of things, and
when he violates his commitments, he does nothing contrary to the reason of his
age.
It follows from this that children's lies are all the work of masters, and that to
want to teach them to tell the truth is nothing other than to teach them to lie. In
one's eagerness to control them, to govern them, to instruct them, one finds one
never has sufficient means for reaching the goal. One wants to give oneself new
holds on their minds by means of maxims without foundation and precepts without
reason; one prefers that they know their lessons and lie, rather than remain
ignorant and true.
For us who give our pupils only lessons in practice and who prefer that they be
good rather than learned—we do not exact the truth from them lest they disguise it,
and we make them give no promises that they would be tempted not to keep. If in my
absence something bad were to happen and I did not know the author of it, I would
take care not to accuse Emile and say to him, "Was it you?" *—for what else would I
be doing by this than teaching him to deny it? If his difficult natural disposition
compels me to come to some agreement with him, I will arrange things so carefully
that the suggestion always comes from him, never from me; that when he has
committed himself, he always has a present and palpable interest in fulfilling his
commitment; and that if he ever fails to do so, the lie attracts evils to him which
he sees as coming from the very order of things and not from the vengeance of his
governor. But, far from needing to resort to expedients so cruel, I am almost sure
that Emile will learn quite late what it is to lie and that, in learning, he will
be quite surprised, unable to conceive what a lie might be
* Nothing is more indiscreet than such a question, especially when the child is
guilty: then if he believes that you know that he did it, he will see that you are
setting a trap for him, and this opinion cannot fail to turn him against you. If he
does not believe it, he will say to himself, "Why should I reveal my offense?" And
this is the first temptation to lie, the effect of your imprudent question.
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BOOK II
good for. It is quite clear that the more I make his well-being independent of
either the will or the judgments of others, the more I reduce any interest in him
to lie.
When one is not in a hurry to instruct, one is not in a hurry to demand and takes
one's time so as to demand nothing except opportunely. Then, the child is formed by
the very fact of not being spoiled. But when a giddy preceptor, not knowing how to
go about it, makes him promise this or that at every instant, without distinction,
selectivity, or moderation, the child, bored, overburdened with all these promises,
neglects them, forgets them, finally despises them, and, regarding them as so many
vain formulas, makes a game out of making them and breaking them. Do you want,
then, that he be faithful to his word? Be discreet in exacting it.
The detail I have just gone into about lying can in many respects be applied to all
the other duties, which are never prescribed to children except in such a way as to
make them not only hateful but impracticable. Appearing to preach virtue to
children, one makes them love all the vices. The vices are given to them by
forbidding them to have them. Does one want to make them pious? They are taken to
church to be bored. Constantly made to mumble prayers, they are driven to aspire to
the happiness of no longer praying to God. That charity be inspired in them, they
are made to give alms—as if one despised giving them oneself. Oh no, it is not the
child who ought to give; it is the master. To the extent that he is attached to his
pupil, he ought to dispute this honor with him; he ought to make the pupil judge
that at his age one is not yet worthy of it. Alms giving is an action for a man who
knows the value of what he gives and the need that his fellow man has of it. In the
child, who knows nothing about that, giving cannot be a merit. He gives without
charity, without beneficence. He is almost ashamed to give when, based on his
example and yours, he believes that it is only children who give and that, grown
up, one no longer gives alms.
Note that the child is always made to give only things of whose value he is
ignorant—some pieces of metal which he has in his pocket and which he uses only for
giving. A child would rather give a hundred louis than a cake. But commit this
prodigal distributor to give things which are dear to him—toys, candies, his snack—
and we shall soon know if you have made him truly liberal.
A remedy for this, too, is found: it is at once to return to the child what he
gave, so that he gets accustomed to giving everything which he is certain of
getting back. I have scarcely seen in children any but these two kinds of
generosity: giving what is good for nothing for them, or giving what they are sure
is going to be returned to them. Arrange it so, says Locke, that they be convinced
by experience that the most liberal man always comes off best.24 That is to make a
child in appearance liberal and in fact a miser. Locke adds that children will
contract in this way the habit of liberality. Yes, of a usurious liberality which
gives an egg to have a cow. But when the case involves straightforward giving,
farewell to the habit. When one stops returning, they will soon stop giving. One
must look to the habit of the soul rather than to that of
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EMILE
the hands. All the other virtues which are taught children resemble this one, and
it is to preach these solid virtues to them that one uses up their young years in
gloom. Is this not an informed education!
Masters, leave off pretenses. Be virtuous and good. Let your examples be graven in
your pupils' memories until they can enter their hearts. Instead of hastening to
exact acts of charity from my pupil, I prefer to do them in his presence and to
deprive him of even the means of imitating me in this, as an honor which is not for
his age; for it is important that he not get accustomed to regarding the duties of
men as only the duties of children. If, seeing me assisting the poor, he questions
me about it, and it is time to answer him,* I shall say to him: "My friend, this is
because, when the poor were willing to let there be rich men, the rich promised to
sustain all those who do not have the means of life, either from their goods or
from their labor." "Then did you, too, promise that?" he will rejoin. "Certainly, I
am master of the wealth that passes through my hands only on the condition attached
to its being property."
After having heard this speech (and it has been seen how a child can be put in a
condition to understand it), another than Emile would be tempted to imitate me and
to behave like a rich man. In such a case I would at least prevent him from doing
so ostentatiously. I would prefer his robbing me of my right and covertly giving.
This is a fraud appropriate to his age, and the only one I would pardon him.
I know that all these virtues by imitation are the virtues of apes, and that no
good action is morally good except when it is done because it is good and not
because others do it. But at an age when the heart feels nothing yet, children just
have to be made to imitate the acts whose habit one wants to give them, until the
time when they can do them out of discernment and love of the good. Man is an
imitator. Even animals are. The taste for imitation belongs to well-ordered nature,
but in society it degenerates into vice. The ape imitates man whom he fears and
does not imitate the animals whom he despises. He judges to be good what is done by
a being better than he. Among us, on the other hand, our Harlequins of every sort
imitate the beautiful to degrade it, to make it ridiculous. They seek, in the
feeling of their own baseness, to level what surpasses them in worth. Or if they
make efforts to imitate what they admire, one sees in the choice of objects the
false taste of the imitators. They want to make an impression on others or to get
applause for their talent far more than to make themselves better or wiser. The
foundation of imitation among us comes from the desire always to be transported out
of ourselves. If I succeed in my enterprise, Emile surely will not have this
desire. We must, therefore, give up the apparent good which imitation can produce.
Think through all the rules of your education; you will find them misconceived,
especially those that concern virtues and morals. The only lesson of morality
appropriate to childhood, and the most important for every age, is never to harm
anyone. The very precept of
* It should be grasped that I do not answer his questions when he pleases but when
I please; otherwise I would be the servant of his will and put myself in the most
dangerous dependence in which a governor can be in relation to his pupil.
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BOOK II
doing good, if it is not subordinated to this one, is dangerous, false, and
contradictory. Who does not do good? Everybody does it—the wicked man as well as
others. He makes one man happy at the expense of making a hundred men miserable;
and this is the source of all our calamities. The most sublime virtues are
negative. They are also the most difficult, because they are without ostentation
and above even that pleasure so sweet to the heart of man, the pleasure of sending
someone away satisfied with us. O what good is necessarily done to his fellows by
the one among them, if there is such a one, who never does them harm! What an
intrepid soul, what a vigorous character he needs for that! It is not in reasoning
about this maxim, but in trying to put it into practice, that one feels how great
it is and how difficult of success.*
These are but a few feeble ideas of the precautions I would wish to see taken in
giving children instruction that one sometimes cannot refuse them without exposing
them to harming themselves and others— and especially to contracting bad habits
which would be hard to correct in them later. But we can be sure that this
necessity will rarely present itself for children raised as they ought to be.
Because it is impossible for them to become intractable, wicked, lying, greedy,
when one has not sowed in their hearts the vices which make them such. Thus, what I
have said on this point serves more for the exception than the rule. But to the
extent that children have more occasions to step out of their condition and
contract the vices of men, exceptions of this kind are the more frequent. Those
raised in the midst of men must of necessity have earlier instruction than those
raised in an out-of-the-way place. This solitary education would, therefore, be
preferable even if its only effect were to give childhood the time for ripening.
There is on the other side another kind of exception for those whom a happy nature
raises above their age. As there are men who never leave childhood, there are
others who, so to speak, do not go through it and who are men almost at birth. The
difficulty is that this latter exception is very rare, very hard to recognize, and
that every mother, imagining that a child might be a prodigy, has no doubt that
hers is one. Mothers go yet farther; they take as marks of extraordinary promise
the very things which point to the accustomed order: vivacity, flashes of wit,
giddiness, piquant naivete—all the most characteristic and telling signs that a
child is only a child. Is it surprising that he who is made to talk a lot, who is
permitted to say everything, and who is not hindered by deference or propriety,
should by chance make some lucky hit? It would be far more surprising if he never
did, just as it would be if along with a thousand lies an astrologer never
predicted a single truth.
* The precept of never hurting another carries with it that of being attached to
human society as little as possible, for in the social state the good of one
necessarily constitutes the harm of another. This relation is in the essence of the
thing, and nothing can change it. On the basis of this principle, let one
investigate who is the better: the social man or the solitary man. An illustrious
author says it is only the wicked man who is alone.2"' I say that it is only the
good man who is alone. If this proposition is less sententious, it is truer and
better reasoned than the former one. If the wicked man were alone, what harm would
he do? It is in society that he sets up his devices for hurting others. If one
wishes to turn this argument around to apply to the good man, I answer with the
passage to which this note belongs.
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They will lie so much, said Henri IV, that finally they will tell the truth.20
Whoever wishes to come up with a certain number of bons mots has only to say many
stupid things. God save the fashionable folk who have no other claim to fame.
The most brilliant thoughts can come into children's brains, or, rather, the best
lines into their mouths, as diamonds of the greatest value might come into their
hands, without either the thoughts or the diamonds thereby belonging to them. There
is no true property of any kind at that age. The things a child says are not to him
what they are to us; he does not attach the same ideas to them. His ideas, if
indeed he has any at all, will have neither order nor connection in his head—
nothing fixed, nothing certain in all that he thinks. Examine your alleged prodigy.
At certain moments you will find in him an extremely taut mainspring, a clarity of
mind which can pierce the clouds. Most often this same mind will seem lax to you,
soggy, and, as it were, surrounded by a thick fog. At one time it gets ahead of
you, the next, it remains immobile. At one moment you would say, "He's a genius,"
and at the next, "He's a fool." You would be mistaken in both cases: what he is is
a child. He is an eaglet who for an instant cleaves the air and then falls back
into his eyrie.
Treat him, then, according to his age, in spite of the appearances, and be afraid
of exhausting his strength for having wanted to exercise it too much. If this young
brain warms up, if you see it beginning to boil, let it ferment freely at first,
but never stimulate it lest it expend itself. And when the first spirits have
evaporated, retain and compress the others until, over the years, all turns into
heat and true strength. Otherwise, you will waste your time and your effort. You
will destroy your own work; and after having intoxicated yourself out of season on
all these inflammable vapors, you will be left with only a marc 27 without vigor.
From giddy children come vulgar men. I know of no observation more universal and
more certain than this one. Nothing is more difficult in respect of childhood than
to distinguish real stupidity from that merely apparent and deceptive stupidity
which is the presage of strong souls. It seems strange at first that the two
extremes should have such similar signs. Nevertheless, it is properly so; for at an
age when man as yet has nothing that is truly an idea, the entire difference
between one who has genius and one who does not is that the latter accepts only
false ideas, and the former, finding only such, accepts none. Thus the genius
resembles the stupid child in that the latter is capable of nothing while nothing
is suitable for the former. The only sign which permits the two to be distinguished
depends on chance, which may present the genius some idea within his reach, while
the stupid child is always the same everywhere. Cato the Younger during his
childhood seemed an imbecile at home. He was taciturn and stubborn—this is all he
was judged to be. It was only in Sulla's antechamber that his uncle learned to know
him. If he had not entered that antechamber, perhaps he would have passed for a
brute until the age of reason. If Caesar had not lived, perhaps they would always
have treated as a visionary this very Cato who discerned Caesar's fatal genius and
foresaw all his projects
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BOOK II
so far in advance.-" O how those who make such hasty judgments about children are
liable to mistakes! They are often more children than the children. I have seen a
man who honored me with his friendship taken, at a rather advanced age, to be a
limited mind by his family and his friends. This excellent head ripened in silence.
Suddenly he proved to be a philosopher, and I do not doubt that posterity will give
him an honorable and distinguished place among the best reasoners and the most
profound metaphysicians of his age.-'J
Respect childhood, and do not hurry to judge it, either for good or for ill. Let
the exceptional children show themselves, be proved, and be confirmed for a long
time before adopting special methods for them. Leave nature to act for a long time
before you get involved with acting in its place, lest you impede its operations.
You know, you say, the value of time and do not want to waste any of it? You do not
see that using ti:ne badly wastes time far more than doing nothing with it and that
a badly instructed child is farther from wisdom than the one who has not been
instructed at all. You are alarmed to see him consume his early years :n doing
nothing. What? Is it nothing to be happy? Is it nothing to jump, play, and run all
day? He will never be so busy in his life. Plato in his republic, believed to be so
austere, raises the children only by festivals, games, songs, and pastimes;30 one
could say that he has done everything when he has taught them well how to enjoy
themselves. And Seneca, speaking of the old Roman youth, says: "They were always on
their feet; they were taught nothing that had to be taught sitting." •" Were they
for that worth any the less on reaching manhood? Therefore, do not be overly
frightened by this alleged idleness. What would you say of a man who, in order to
profit from his whole life, never wanted to sleep? You would say, "That man is
crazy; he does not gain time for his joy; he deprives himself of it. To flee sleep,
he races toward death." Be aware, then, that we have here the same thing and that
childhood is reason's sleep.
Apparent facility at learning is the cause of children's ruin. It is not seen that
this very facility is the proof they learn nothing. Their brain, smooth and
polished, returns, like a mirror, the objects presented to it. But nothing remains;
nothing penetrates. The child retains the words; the ideas are reflected off of
him. Those who hear him understand them; only he does not understand them.
Although memory and reasoning are two essentially different faculties, nevertheless
the one develops truly only with the other. Before the age of reason the child
receives not ideas but images; and the difference between the two is that images
are only absolute depictions of sensible objects, while ideas are notions of
objects determined by relations. An image can stand all alone in the mind which
represents it, but every idea supposes other ideas. When one imagines, one does
nothing but see; when one conceives, one is comparing. Our sensations are purely
passive, while all our perceptions or ideas are born out of an active principle
which judges. This will be demonstrated hereafter.
Therefore I say that children, not being capable of judgment, do not have true
memory. They retain sounds, figures, sensations, ideas rarely, the connections
between ideas more rarely. Those who object,
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saying that children learn some elements of geometry, believe this to be good proof
against me; whereas on the contrary, it is proof for my case. It is demonstrable
that, far from knowing how to reason by themselves, little geometers do not even
know how to retain the reasonings of others. For follow them in their method, and
you see immediately that they have retained only the exact impression of the figure
and the terms of the demonstration. At the least new objection they can no longer
follow. Turn the figure upside down, they can no longer follow. Their entire
learning is in sensation; nothing has gone through to the understanding. Their
memory itself is hardly more perfect than their other faculties, since they must
almost always, when they are grown, relearn the things for which they learned the
words in childhood.
I am, however, very far from thinking that children have no kind of reasoning.* On
the contrary, I see that they reason very well in everything they know that relates
to their immediate and palpable interest. But one is mistaken about their
knowledge, ascribing to them knowledge they do not have and making them reason
about what they could not understand. One is again mistaken in wanting to make them
pay attention to considerations which do not touch them in any way, such as their
future concerns, their happiness when they are men, the esteem in which they will
be held as adults—speeches which, given to beings unendowed with any foresight,
signify absolutely nothing to them. Now all the studies forced on these poor
unfortunates are directed to these objects entirely alien to their minds. You can
judge of the attention they can pay to them!
The pedagogues who present such a showy display of the instruction they give their
disciples are paid for using other language than mine. However, one sees by their
very conduct that they think exactly as I do, for what do they teach them after
all? Words, more words, always words. Among the various sciences that they boast of
teaching their pupils, they are quite careful not to include those which would be
truly useful to them, because they would be sciences of things, and with these they
would not succeed. Rather they choose those sciences one appears to know when one
knows their terminology: heraldry, geography, chronology, languages, etc.—all
studies so far from man, and especially from the child, that it would be a wonder
if anything at all in them were of use to him a single time in his life.
People will be surprised that I number the study of languages among
* I have a hundred times in writing made the reflection that it is impossible in a
long work always to give the same meanings to the same words. There is no language
rich enough to furnish as many terms, turns, and phrases as our ideas can have
modifications. The method of defining all the terms and constantly substituting the
definition in the place of the defined is fine but impracticable, for how can a
circle be avoided? Definitions could be good if words were not used to make them.
In spite of that, I am persuaded that one can be clear, even in the poverty of our
language, not by always giving the same meanings to the same words, but by
arranging it so that as often as each word is used, the meaning given it be
sufficiently determined by the ideas related to it and that each period where the
word is found serves it, so to speak, as a definition. One time I say children are
incapable of reasoning; another time I make them reason quite keenly. I do not
believe that with that I contradict myself in my ideas; but I cannot gainsay that I
often contradict myself in my expressions.
[108]
BOOK II
the useless parts of education. But remember that I am speaking here only of
studies appropriate to the early years; and, whatever may be said, I do not believe
that up to the age of twelve or fifteen any child, prodigies apart, has ever truly
learned two languages.
I agree that if the study of languages were only the study of words— that is to
say, of figures or the sounds which express them—it could be suitable for children.
But in changing the signs, languages also modify the ideas which these signs
represent. Minds are formed by languages; the thoughts take on the color of the
idioms. Only reason is common; in each lanuage the mind has its particular form.
This is a difference which might very well be a part of the cause or of the effect
of national characters; and what appears to confirm this conjecture is that in all
the nations of the world language follows the vicissitudes of morals and is
preserved or degenerates as they are.
Normal usage gives but one of all these various forms to the child, and it is the
only one he keeps until the age of reason. To have two, he would have to know how
to compare ideas, and how could he compare them when he is hardly in a condition to
conceive them? Each thing can have for him a thousand different signs. But each
idea can have only one form. He can, therefore, learn to speak only one language. I
am told, however, that he learns several. I deny it. I have seen these little
prodigies who believed that they spoke five or six languages. I have heard them
speak German in Latin terms, in French terms, in Italian terms successively. They
did in truth make use of five or six lexicons. But they always spoke only German.
In a word; give children as many synonyms as you please; you will change the words,
not the language. They will never know any but one.
It is to hide this ineptitude of theirs that they are by preference trained in the
dead languages, of which there are no more judges to whom one can have recourse.
The familiar usage of these languages having long been lost, one is satisfied with
imitating what is found written in books. And that is what is called speaking them.
If such is the masters' Greek and Latin, you can judge the children's! Hardly have
they learned by heart the rudiments, of which they understand absolutely nothing,
when they are first taught to render a French discourse in Latin words; then, when
they are more advanced, to stitch together in prose some phrases of Cicero and in
verse some morsels of Virgil. Then they believe that they speak Latin. Who will
come and contradict them?
In any study whatsoever, unless one has the ideas of the things represented, the
representative signs are nothing. However, one always limits the child to these
signs without ever being able to make him understand any of the things which they
represent. Thinking he is being taught a description of the earth, he learns only
to know some maps. He is taught the names of cities, of countries, of rivers which
he does not conceive as existing anywhere else but on the paper where he is showed
them. I remember having seen somewhere a geography text which began thus: "What is
the world? It is a cardboard globe." Such precisely is the geography of children. I
set down as a fact that after
[109]
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two years of globe and cosmography there is not a single child of ten who,
following the rules he has been given, knows how to get from Paris to Saint-Denis.
I set down as a fact that there is not one who, on the basis of a map of his
father's garden, is able to follow its winding paths without getting lost. These
are the doctors who know on the spur of the moment where Peking, Ispahan, Mexico,
and all the countries of the earth are.
I hear it said that it is suitable to busy children with studies requiring only
their eyes. That might be, if there were some study in which only eyes were
required. But I know of none such.
By an error even more ridiculous they are made to study history. One imagines that
history is within their reach because it is only a collection of facts. But what is
meant by this word facts? Can anyone believe that the relations which determine
historical facts are so easy to grasp that ideas are effortlessly formed from the
facts in children's minds? Can anyone believe that the true knowledge of events is
separable from that of their causes or of their effects and that the historical is
so little connected with the moral that one can be known without the other? If you
see in men's actions only the exterior and purely physical movements, what do you
learn from history? Absolutely nothing. And this study, devoid of all interest,
gives you no more pleasure than it does instruction. If you want your pupils to
appreciate such actions in their moral relations, try to make them understand these
relations, and you will see then whether history is a proper study at their age.
Readers, always remember that he who speaks to you is neither a scholar nor a
philosopher, but a simple man, a friend of the truth, without party, without
system; a solitary who, living little among men, has less occasion to contract
their prejudices and more time to reflect on what strikes him when he has commerce
with them. My reasonings are founded less on principles than on facts; and I
believe that I cannot better put you in a position to judge of them than often to
report to you some example of the observations which suggested them to me.
I had gone to spend a few days in the country at the home of a good mother of a
family who took great care of her children and their education. One morning when I
was present at the lessons of the eldest, his governor, who had instructed him very
well in ancient history, was reviewing the history of Alexander. He took up the
famous story about Philip, the physician, which has been a subject of painting, and
which was surely well worth the effort.32 The governor, a man of merit, made
several reflections on Alexander's intrepidity, which did not please me at all, but
which I avoided disputing so as not to discredit him in his pupil's mind. At table
they did not fail, according to the French method, to make the little gentleman
babble a great deal. The vivacity natural to his age, along with the expectation of
certain applause, made him reel off countless stupidities, in the midst of which
from time to time there came a few lucky words which caused the rest to be
forgotten. Finally came the story of Philip, the physician. He told it quite
clearly and with much grace. After the ordinary tribute of praises exacted by the
mother and expected by the son, there was discussion about what he
[no]
BOOK II
had said. The greater number blamed the temerity of Alexander; some, after the
governor's example, admired his firmness and his courage— which made me understand
that none of those present saw wherein lay the true beauty of this story. "As for
me," I said to them, "it seems that if there is the least courage, the least
firmness, in Alexander's action, it is foolhardy." 83 Then everyone joined in and
agreed that it was foolhardy. I was going to respond and was getting heated when a
woman sitting beside me, who had not opened her mouth, leaned toward my ear and
said softly to me, "Keep quiet, Jean-Jacques, they won't understand you." I looked
at her; I was struck; and I kept quiet.
After the dinner, suspecting, on the basis of several bits of evidence, that my
young doctor had understood nothing at all of the story he had told so well, I took
him by the hand and went for a turn in the park with him. Having questioned him at
my ease, I found that more than anyone he admired Alexander's much-vaunted courage.
But do you know in what he found this courage to consist? Solely in having
swallowed at a single gulp a bad-tasting potion, without hesitation, without the
least sign of repugnance. The poor child, who had been made to take medicine not
two weeks before, and who had taken it only after a mighty effort, still had its
aftertaste in his mouth. Death and poisoning stood in his mind only for
disagreeable sensations; and he did not conceive, for his part, of any other poison
than senna. Nevertheless, it must admitted that the hero's firmness had made a
great impression on the boy's young heart, and that, at the next medicine he would
have to swallow, he had resolved to be an Alexander. Without going into
clarifications which were evidently out of his reach, I confirmed him in these
laudable dispositions; and I went back laughing to myself at the lofty wisdom of
fathers and masters who think they teach history to children.
It is easy to put into their mouths the words kings, empires, wars, conquests,
revolutions, laws. But if it is a question of attaching distinct ideas to these
words, there is a long way from the conversation with Robert the gardener to all
these explanations.
Some readers, discontented with the "Keep quiet, Jean-Jacques," will, I foresee,
ask what, after all, do I find so fair in Alexander's action? Unfortunate people!
If you have to be told, how will you understand it? It is that Alexander believed
in virtue; it is that he staked his head, his own life on that belief; it is that
his great soul was made for believing in it. Oh, what a fair profession of faith
was the swallowing of that medicine! No, never did a mortal make so sublime a one.
If there is some modern Alexander, let him be showed to me by like deeds.
If there is no science of words, there is no study proper for children. If they
have no true ideas, they have no true memory, for I do not call by that name the
mere retention of sensations. What is the use of inscribing in their heads a
catalogue of signs which represent nothing for them? In learning the things, will
they not learn the signs? Why put them to the useless effort of learning the signs
twice? And, meanwhile, what dangerous prejudices does one not begin to inspire in
them by making them take for science words which have no sense for them? It is with
the first word the child uses in order to show off, it is with
[m]
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the first thing he takes on another's word without seeing its utility himself, that
his judgment is lost. He will have to shine in the eyes of fools for a long time in
order to make up for such a loss.*
No, if nature gives the child's brain the suppleness that fits it to receive all
sorts of impressions, it is not in order to engrave on this brain the names of
kings, dates, terms of heraldry, globes and geography, and all those words without
any sense for the child's age, and devoid of utility for any age whatsoever, with
which his sad and sterile childhood is burdened. Rather, the suppleness is there in
order that all the ideas which he can conceive and are useful to him—all those
which are related to his happiness and are one day going to enlighten him about his
duties—may be impressed on his brain with an indelible stamp at an early age and
help him during his life to behave in a way suitable to his being and his
faculties.
The kind of memory a child can have does not, without his studying books, for this
reason remain idle. Everything he sees, everything he hears strikes him, and he
remembers it. He keeps in himself a record of the actions and the speeches of men,
and all that surrounds him is the book in which, without thinking about it, he
continually enriches his memory while waiting for his judgment to be able to profit
from it. It is in the choice of these objects, it is in the care with which one
constantly presents him the objects he can know, and hides from him those he ought
not to know, that the true art of cultivating in him this first faculty consists;
and it is in this way that one must try to form in him a storehouse of knowledge
which serves his education during his youth and his conduct at all times. This
method, it is true, does not form little prodigies and does not make governors and
preceptors shine. But it forms men who are judicious, robust, healthy of body and
understanding, men who, without having made themselves admired when young, make
themselves honored when grown.
Emile will never learn anything by heart, not even fables, not even those of La
Fontaine,84 as naive, as charming as they are, for the words of fables are no more
fables than the words of history are history. How can people be so blinded as to
call fables the morality of children? They do not think about how the apologue,36
in giving enjoyment to children, deceives them; about how, seduced by the lie, they
let the truth escape; and about how what is done to make the instruction agreeable
to them prevents them from profiting from it. Fables can instruct men, but the
naked truth has to be told to children. When one
* Most learned men are learned in the way of children. Vast erudition results less
from a multitude of ideas than from a multitude of images. Dates, proper names,
places, all objects isolated or devoid of ideas are retained solely by memory of
signs; and rarely does one recall some one of these things without at the same time
seeing the page on the right- or the left-hand side where it was read or the form
in which it was seen for the first time. Pretty nearly such was the science
fashionable in the last ages. That of our age is something else. One no longer
studies, one no longer observes, one dreams; and we are gravely presented with the
dreams of some bad nights as philosophy. I will be told that I, too, dream. I
agree; but I give my dreams as dreams, which others are not careful to do, leaving
it to the reader to find out whether they contain something useful for people who
are awake.
[112]
BOOK II
starts covering the truth with a veil, they no longer make the effort to lift it.-™
All children are made to learn the fables of La Fontaine; and there is not a single
one who understands them. If they were to understand them, that would be still
worse, for the moral in them is so mixed and so disproportionate :" to their age
that it would lead them more to vice than to virtue. These again, you will say, are
paradoxes. So be it; but let us see whether they are truths.
I say that a child does not understand the fables he is made to learn, because, no
matter what effort is made to simplify them, the instruction that one wants to draw
from them compels the introduction of ideas he cannot grasp; and because poetry's
very skill at making them easier for him to retain makes them difficult for him to
conceive, so that one buys delight at the expense of clarity. Without citing that
multitude of fables which contain nothing intelligible or useful for children and
which they are made to learn along with the others indiscriminately because they
are found mixed in with them, let us limit ourselves to those the author seems to
have made especially for children.
I know in the whole collection of La Fontaine only five or six fables in which
childish naivete genuinely predominates. Of these five or six I take for example
the very first because it is the one whose moral is most fitting to all ages, the
one children grasp best, the one they learn with the most pleasure, finally the one
that for this very reason the author chose to put at the head of his book.*8
Supposing that his object were to be really understood by children, to please and
instruct them, this fable is assuredly his masterpiece. Permit me then to follow it
through and examine it in a few words.
The Crow and the Fox
FABLE
Master Crow, on a tree perched, Master I What does this word signify in itself?
What does it signify in front of a proper name? What meaning has it on this
occasion? 30
What is a crow?
What is a tree perched? One does not say: "on a tree perched"; one says: "perched
on a tree." Consequently one has to talk about poetic inversions; one has to tell
what prose and verse are. Held in his beak a cheese.
What cheese? Was it a Swiss cheese, a Brie, or a Dutch? If the child has not seen
crows, what do you gain by speaking to him about them? If he has seen them, how
will he conceive of their holding a cheese in their beak? Let us always make images
according to nature. Master Fox by the odor atticed
Another master! But to this one the title really belongs: he is a past-master in
the tricks of his trade. One has to say what a fox is and
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EMILE
the child is then no longer a lion; he is a gnat. He learns how one day to kill
with stings those he would not dare to stand and attack.44
In the fable of the lean wolf and the fat dog, instead of a lesson in moderation,
which is what it is claimed the child is being given, he gets one in license.45 I
shall never forget having seen a little girl weeping bitterly, upset by this fable
which was supposedly preaching docility to her. It was difficult to get at the
cause of her tears. Finally we found out. The poor child was irritated by being
chained. She felt her neck rubbed raw. She was crying at not being a wolf.
Thus, the moral of the first fable cited is for the child a lesson in the basest
flattery; of the second, a lesson in inhumanity; of the third, a lesson in
injustice; of the fourth, a lesson in satire; of the fifth, a lesson in
independence. This last lesson, superfluous as it is for my pupil, is no more
suitable for yours. When you give him contradictory precepts, what fruit do you
hope for from your efforts? But, perhaps, with this exception, this whole morality
which serves me as an objection to fables provides as many reasons for preserving
them. In society there is needed one morality in words and one in action, and these
two moralities do not resemble each other. The first is in the cathechism, where it
is left. The other is in La Fontaine's fables for children and in his tales for
mothers. The same author suffices for everything.46
Let us come to terms, Monsieur de La Fontaine. I promise, for my part, to read you
discriminately, to like you, to instruct myself in your fables, for I hope not to
be deceived about their object. But, as for my pupil, permit me not to let him
study a single one of them until you have proved to me that it is good for him to
learn things a quarter of which he will not understand; that in those he will be
able to understand, he will never be led astray; and that he will not, instead of
improving himself on the dupe's example, form himself after the rascal's example.
In thus taking away all duties from children, I take away the instruments of their
greatest misery—that is, books. Reading is the plague of childhood and almost the
only occupation we know how to give it. At twelve Emile will hardly know what a
book is. But, it will be said, he certainly must at least know how to read. I
agree. He must know how to read when reading is useful to him; up to then it is
only good for boring him.
If one ought to demand nothing of children through obedience, it follows that they
can learn nothing of which they do not feel the real and present advantage in
either pleasure or utility. Otherwise, what motive would bring them to learn it?
The art of speaking to and hearing from absent people, the art of communicating our
feelings, our wills, our desires to them at a distance without a mediator is an art
whose utility can be rendered palpable to all ages. What wonderful means were used
to turn so useful and so agreeable an art into a torment for childhood? Because the
young are constrained to apply themselves to it in spite of themselves, it is put
to uses of which they understand nothing. A child is not very eager to perfect the
instrument with which he is tormented. But arrange things so that this instrument
serves his pleasures, and soon he will apply himself to it in spite of you.
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BOOK II
A great business is made of seeking the best methods of teaching reading. Desks and
cards are invented; a child's room is made into a printing shop. Locke wants him to
learn to read with dice.47 Now is that not a clever invention? What a pity! A means
surer than all these, and the one always forgotten, is the desire to learn. Give
the child this desire; then let your desks and your dice go. Any method will be
good for him.
Present interest—that is the great mover, the only one which leads surely and far.
Sometimes Emile receives from his father, from his mother, from his relatives, from
his friends, notes of invitation for a dinner, for a walk, for an outing on the
water, for watching some public festival. These notes are short, clear, distinct,
well written. Someone has to be found who can read them to him. This someone either
is not always to be found on the spur of the moment or is paying the child back for
his unwillingness to oblige him the day before. Thus the occasion, the moment, is
missed. Finally the note is read to him, but it is too late. Oh, if he had known
how to read himself! Other notes are received. They are so short! Their subject is
so interesting! He would like to try to decipher them. Sometimes he is given help,
and sometimes he is refused it. Finally he deciphers half of a note. It has to do
with going tomorrow to eat custard ... he does not know where or with whom . . .
how many efforts he makes to read the rest! I do not believe Emile will need the
desk. Shall I speak now of writing? No. I am ashamed of playing with this kind of
foolishness in an educational treatise.
I shall add this one word which constitutes an important maxim: it is that usually
one gets very surely and quickly what one is not in a hurry to get. I am almost
certain that Emile will know how to read and write perfectly before the age of ten,
precisely because it makes very little difference to me that he knows how before
fifteen. But I would rather that he never knew how to read if this science has to
be bought at the price of all that can make it useful. Of what use will reading be
to him if it has been made repulsive to him forever? Id in primus cavere
opportebit, ne studia, qui amove nondum poterit, oderit, et amari-tudinem semel
perceptam etiam ultra rudes annos reformidet*
The more I insist on my inactive method, the stronger I see your objections grow.
If your pupil learns nothing from you, he will learn from others. If you do not
forestall error by means of truth, he will learn lies. The prejudices you are
afraid of giving him, he will receive from everything around him. They will enter
by all his senses: either they will corrupt his reason even before it is formed, or
his mind, stupefied by long inactivity, will be engrossed in matter. The lack of
the habit of thinking in childhood takes away the faculty for the rest of life.
It seems to me that I could easily answer that. But why always answers? If my
method by itself answers objections, it is good. If it does not answer them, it is
worthless. I shall proceed.
If, according to the plan I have begun to outline, you follow rules directly
contrary to the established ones; if instead of taking your pupil's mind far away;
if instead of constantly leading it astray in other
* Quintilian Institutio Oratorio I:20.'8
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EMILE
places, other climates, other times, at the extremities of the earth and up to the
heavens, you apply yourself to keeping him always within himself and attentive to
what touches him immediately, then you will find him capable of perception, memory,
and even reasoning. This is nature's order. To the extent the sensitive being
becomes active, he acquires a discernment proportionate to his strengths; and it is
only with a surplus of strength beyond what he needs to preserve himself that there
develops in him the speculative faculty fit to employ this excess of strength for
other uses. Do you, then, want to cultivate your pupil's intelligence? Cultivate
the strengths it ought to govern. Exercise his body continually; make him robust
and healthy in order to make him wise and reasonable. Let him work, be active, run,
yell, always be in motion. Let him be a man in his vigor, and soon he will be one
in his reason.
You will make him sodden, it is true, by this method if you go about always giving
him directions, always telling him, "Go, come, stay, do this, don't do that." If
your head always controls his arms, his head becomes useless to him. But remember
our conventions. If you are only a pedant, it is not worth the effort to read me.
It is a most pitiable error to imagine that the exercise of the body is harmful to
the operations of the mind, as if these two activities ought not to move together
in harmony and that the one ought not always to direct the other!
There are two sorts of men whose bodies are in constant activity, and who both
surely think equally little of cultivating their souls—that is, peasants and
savages. The former are crude, heavy, maladroit; the latter, known for their good
sense, are also known for their subtlety of mind. To put it generally, nothing is
duller than a peasant and nothing sharper than a savage. What is the source of this
difference? It is that the former, doing always what he is ordered or what he saw
his father do or what he has himself done since his youth, works only by routine;
and in his life, almost an automaton's, constantly busy with the same labors, habit
and obedience take the place of reason for him.
For the savage it is another story. Attached to no place, without prescribed task,
obeying no one, with no other law than his will, he is forced to reason in each
action of his life. He does not make a movement, not a step, without having
beforehand envisaged the consequences. Thus, the more his body is exercised, the
more his mind is enlightened; his strength and his reason grow together, and one is
extended by the other.
Learned preceptor, let us see which of our two pupils resembles the savage and
which resembles the peasant. Submitted in everything to an authority which is
always teaching, yours does nothing unless given the word. He dares not eat when he
is hungry, nor laugh when he is gay, nor cry when he is sad, nor put out one hand
instead of the other, nor move his foot except as has been prescribed to him. Soon
he will dare to breathe only according to your rules. About what do you want him to
think when you think about everything for him? Assured of your foresight, what need
has he of any? Seeing that you take the responsibility for his preservation, for
his well-being, he feels delivered
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BOOK II
from this care. His judgment rests on yours. Everything you do not forbid him, he
does without reflection, knowing well that he does it without risk. What need does
he have to foresee rain? He knows that you look at the sky for him. What need has
he to organize his walk? He has no fear that you would let the dinner hour pass. So
long as you do not forbid him to eat, he eats. When you forbid him, he eats no
more. He no longer listens to the opinions of his stomach but yours. You may very
well soften his body by inactivity, you do not for that make his understanding more
flexible. All to the contrary, you complete the work of discrediting reason in his
mind by making him use the little he possesses on the things which appear to him
the most useless. Never seeing what it is good for, he finally makes the judgment
that it is good for nothing. The worst that can happen to him from reasoning badly
is to be admonished; and that happens to him so often that he hardly thinks about
it; a danger so common no longer frightens him.
You find, however, that he is clever, and so he is when it comes to babbling with
women in the manner about which I have already spoken. But when it comes to a case
of personal risk, to his taking a position in some difficult situation, you will
find him to be a hundred times stupider and more foolish than the son of the
biggest yokel.
As for my pupil, or rather nature's, trained early to be as self-sufficient as
possible, he is not accustomed to turning constantly to others; still less is he
accustomed to displaying his great learning for them. On the other hand, he judges,
he foresees, he reasons in everything immediately related to him. He does not
chatter; he acts. He does not know a word of what is going on in society, but he
knows very well how to do what suits himJSInce he is constantly in motion, he is
forced to observe many things, to know many effectsJ He acquires a large experience
early. He gets his lessons from nature and not from men. He instructs himself so
much the better because he sees nowhere the intention to instruct him. Thus his
body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always according to his own
thought and not someone else's, he continually unites two operations: the more he
makes himself strong and robust, the more he becomes sensible and judicious. This
is the way one day to have what are believed incompatible and what are united in
almost all great men: strength of body and strength of soul; a wise man's reason
and an athlete's vigor.
Young teacher, I am preaching a difficult art to you, that of governing without
precepts and doing everything by doing nothing. This art, I agree, is not one that
goes with your age; it is not fit to make your talents conspicuous from the outset
nor to make an impression on fathers. But it is the only one fit for succeeding.
You will never get to the point of producing wise men if you do not in the first
place produce rascals. This was the education of the Spartans: instead of being
glued to books, they began by being taught how to steal their dinner. Were the
Spartans as a result crude when grown? Who does not know the force and saltiness of
their rejoinders? Always made to conquer, they crushed their enemies in every kind
of war; and the Athenian babblers feared their words as much as their blows.
In the most careful educations the master commands and believes he
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EMILE
governs. It is actually the child who governs. He uses what you exact from him to
obtain from you what pleases him; and he always knows how to make you pay a week of
obligingness for an hour of assiduity. At every instant pacts must be made with
him. These treaties, which you propose in your fashion and he executes in his,
always turn to the profit of his whims, especially when you are so clumsy as to
promise him something as your part of the bargain which he is quite sure of getting
whether or not he fulfills his part. The child usually reads the master's mind much
better than the master reads the child's heart. And that is the way it should be;
for all the sagacity the child would have used to provide for the preservation of
his person had he been left to himself he uses to save his natural freedom from his
tyrant's chains. On the other hand, the latter, having no interest so pressing for
seeing through the child, sometimes finds it to his own advantage to let the child
have his laziness or vanity.
Take an opposite route with your pupil. Let him always believe he is the master,
and let it always be you who are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which
keeps the appearance of freedom. Thus the will itself is made captive. The poor
child who knows nothing, who can do nothing, who has no learning, is he not at your
mercy? Do you not dispose, with respect to him, of everything which surrounds him?
Are you not the master of affecting him as you please? Are not his labors, his
games, his pleasures, his pains, all in your hands without his knowing it?
Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you
want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it; he
ought not to open his mouth without your knowing what he is going to say.
It is then that he will be able to give himself over to the exercises of the body
that his age demands of him without stultifying his mind. It is then that instead
of sharpening his ruses for eluding your uncomfortable grip, you will see him busy
himself only with taking the greatest possible advantage of everything around him
for his real well-being. It is then that you will be surprised by the subtlety of
his inventions for appropriating all objects he can attain and for truly enjoying
things without the help of opinion.
In leaving him thus master of his will, you will not be fomenting his caprices. By
never doing anything except what suits him, he will soon do only what he ought to
do; and although his body is in continuous motion, so long as he is concerned only
with his immediate and palpable interest, you will witness developing all the
reason of which he is capable much better and in a way much more appropriate to him
than it would in purely speculative studies.
Thus, not seeing you eager to oppose him, not distrusting you, with nothing to hide
from you, he will not deceive you, he will not lie to you, he will fearlessly show
himself precisely as he is. You will be able to study him at your complete ease and
arrange all around him the lessons you want to give him without his ever thinking
he is receiving any.
He will also not be spying on your morals with a curiosity motivated by jealousy
and will not find a secret pleasure in catching you misbehaving. This disadvantage
which we are forestalling is a very great
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BOOK II
one. One of children's first efforts, as I have said, is to discover the weakness
of those who govern them. This inclination leads to wickedness but does not come
from it. It comes from the need to elude an authority which importunes them.
Overburdened by the yoke inposed on them, they seek to shake it off, and the
shortcomings they find in the masters furnish them with good means for that.
However, the habit of scrutinizing people for their shortcomings and getting
pleasure at finding them grows on children. Here clearly is yet another source of
vice stopped up in Emile's heart. With no interest in finding shortcomings in me,
he will not look for them and will be little tempted to look for them in others.
All these practices seem difficult because one does not really consider them, but
at bottom they ought not to be. I have a right to assume that you possess the
enlightenment necessary for exercising the vocation you have chosen; I have to
assume that you know the natural development of the human heart, that you know how
to study man and the individual, that you know beforehand what will bend your
pupil's will when he confronts all the objects of interest to his age that you will
cause to pass before his eyes. Now, to have the instruments and to know their use
well, is that not to be the master of an operation?
You raise as an objection children's caprices, and you are wrong. The
capriciousness of children is never the work of nature but is the work of bad
discipline. It is that they have either obeyed or commanded, and I have said a
hundred times that they must do neither. Your pupil will, therefore, have only the
caprices you have given him. It is only just that you pay the penalty for your
mistakes. But, you will say, how can this be remedied? It is still possible with
better conduct and much patience.
For a few weeks I took care of a child accustomed not only to do his will but to
make everyone else do it as well—consequently a child full of whims.49 Right on the
first day, to try out my obligingness, he wanted to get up at midnight. When I was
sleeping most soundly, he jumped down from his bed, took his robe, and called me. I
got up, lit the candle. He wanted nothing more. Within a quarter of an hour sleep
overcame him, and he went back to bed satisfied with his test. Two days later he
repeated it with the same success and without the least sign of impatience on my
part. As he kissed me on going back to bed, I said to him in a deliberate tone, "My
little friend, this is all very well, but do not try it again." This phrase aroused
his curiosity, and the very next day, wanting to get a glimpse of how I would dare
to disobey him, he did not fail to get up again at the same time and call me. I
asked him what he wanted. He told me he could not sleep. "Too bad," I replied, and
kept quiet. He asked me to light the candle. "What for?" and I kept quiet. This
laconic tone began to distress him. He started feeling about, looking for the
steel, which he made a show of striking; and I could not keep from laughing,
hearing him give himself blows on the fingers. Finally, quite convinced he would
not succeed at it, he brought me the lighter to my bed. I told him I had no need of
it and turned on my other side. Then he started running giddily around the room,
yelling, singing, making a lot of noise, purposely bumping into the table and
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EMILE
chairs, which he took care not to do too hard while letting out great cries, hoping
to worry me. None of this worked; and I saw that, counting on high exhortations or
anger, he had in no way prepared himself for this coolness.
However, resolved to overcome my patience by dint of his obstinacy, he continued
his racket with such success that in the end I began to flare up; and, sensing that
I was going to ruin everything by an inopportune loss of temper, I decided on
another course. I got up without saying a thing and went to the steel, which I
could not find. I asked him for it. He gave it to me bubbling over with joy at
having at last triumphed over me. I struck the steel, lit the candle, took my
little gentleman by the hand, led him calmly into a nearby little room, the
shutters of which were tightly closed and where there was nothing to break. I left
him there without light; then, locking the door with the key, I went back to bed
without having said a single word to him. You need not ask if at first there was an
uproar. I was expecting it and was not moved by it. Finally the noise abated. I
listened, heard him settling down. I put my mind at rest. The next day in the
morning I went into the little room and found my tiny rebel lying on a couch
sleeping a profound sleep, which, after so much fatigue, he must have badly needed.
The affair did not end there. His mother learned that the child had spent two-
thirds of the night out of his bed. Immediately all was lost; he was a child as
good as dead. Seeing that the occasion was good for getting his revenge, he played
sick without foreseeing he would gain nothing from it. The doctor was called.
Unhappily for the mother, this doctor was a jester and, to enjoy her terrors, made
an effort to increase them. Meanwhile he whispered in my ear, "Leave it to me. I
promise you that the child will be cured for some time of the whim of being sick."
Indeed, diet and bed were prescribed, and the child was turned over to the
apothecary. I sighed at seeing this poor mother thus the dupe of all that
surrounded her, with the single exception of me, for whom she conceived hatred,
precisely because I did not deceive her.
After rather harsh reproaches she told me that her son was delicate, that he was
his family's sole heir, that he must be preserved at whatever cost, and that she
did not want him provoked. In that I quite agreed with her. But what she understood
by provoking him was not obeying him in everything. I saw that the same tone had to
be taken with the mother as with the child. "Madame," I said to her rather coldly,
"I do not know how one raises an heir, and, what is more, I do not want to learn
how. You can take care of that for yourself." I was still needed for a time; the
father quieted it all down; the mother wrote the preceptor to hasten his return;
and the child, seeing he got nothing out of disturbing my sleep or in being sick,
finally made the decision to sleep himself and to be in good health.
It cannot be imagined to how many similar caprices the little tyrant had subjected
his unlucky governor, for the education was conducted under the eyes of the mother
who did not tolerate the heir's being disobeyed in anything. At whatever hour he
wanted to go out, one h~i to be ready to lead or, rather, follow him, and he was
always very careful to choose the moment when he saw that his governor was busiest.
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BOOK II
He wanted to hold the same sway over me and get revenge during the day for the rest
he was forced to leave me at night. I lent myself good-heartedly to everything; and
I began by establishing in his eyes the pleasure I took in obliging him. After that
when the issue was to cure him of his whim, I went about it in a different way.
He had in the first place to be put in the wrong, and that was not difficult.
Knowing that children think only of the present, I took the easy advantage of
foresight over him. I took care of providing for him at home a game which I knew to
be very much to his taste; and at the moment when I saw him most infatuated with
it, I went and proposed a walk to him. He turned me down flat. I persisted. He did
not listen to me. I had to give up. He took careful note in himself of this sign of
subjection.
The day after, it was my turn. He was bored. I had arranged for that. I, on the
contrary, appeared profoundly busy. He needed nothing more to decide him. He did
not fail to come to tear me away from my work to take him for a walk immediately. I
refused; he insisted. "No," I said to him, "in doing your will, you have taught me
to do mine. I do not want to go out." "Very well," he responded hotly, "I shall go
out all alone." "As you wish," and I returned to my work.
He got dressed, a bit uneasy at seeing me let him go ahead and not following his
example. Ready to go out, he came to bid me farewell. I bade him farewell. He tried
to alarm me with the account of the trips he was going to make. To hear him one
would have thought he was going to the end of the world. Without any disturbance on
my part, I wished him bon voyage. His embarrassment was redoubled. However, he put
a good face on it; and ready to go out, he told his lackey to follow him. The
lackey, already forewarned, answered that he did not have the time, and, busy at my
orders, he had to obey me rather than him. Now at this the child was upset. How
could it be conceived that he be allowed to go out alone, he who believed himself
the being most important to everyone else, and who thought that sky and earth took
an interest in his preservation? Meanwhile he began to feel his weakness. He
understood that he was going to be alone among people who did not know him. He saw
beforehand the risks he was going to run. Obstinacy alone still sustained him. He
went down the stairs slowly and very ill at ease. He finally stepped out on the
street, consoling himself somewhat for the harm that could happen to him by the
hope that I would be made responsible for it.
This was just what I was waiting for. Everything was prepared in advance; and since
a kind of public scene was involved, I had provided myself with the father's
consent. Hardly had the child taken a few steps before he heard, right and left,
remarks about him. "Neighbor, look at the pretty monsieur! Where is he going all
alone? He is going to get lost. I want to ask him to come in our house." "Don't you
dare, neighbor. Don't you see that this is a little libertine who has been driven
out of his father's house because he did not want to be good for anything?
Sanctuary must not be given libertines. Let him go where he will." "Too bad. Let
God guide him. I would be sorry if misfortune were to come to him." A bit farther
on he met up with some rascals of about
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EMILE
his age who provoked him and jeered at him. The farther he went, the more confused
he became. Alone and without protection, he saw himself everybody's plaything; and
he experienced with much surprise that his epaulettes and gold trim did not make
him more respected.
Meanwhile one of my friends, whom he did not know and to whom I had given the
responsibility of watching over him, was following him step by step without his
noticing it, and accosted him when the time was right. This role, which resembled
Sbrigani's in Pourceaugnac,60 called for a man of ready wit and was perfectly
filled. Without making the child timid and fearful by striking too great a terror
in him, he made him so well aware of the imprudence of his escapade that at the end
of half an hour he brought him back to me, tractable, embarrassed, and not daring
to lift his eyes.
To complete the disaster of his expedition, precisely at the moment that he came
home, his father was coming down to go out, and met him on the stairs. The child
had to say where he was coming from and why I was not with him.* The poor child
would have wanted to be a hundred feet under the earth. Without wasting his time in
giving him a long reprimand, the father said to him more curtly than I would have
expected, "If you want to go out alone, you are the master. But since I do not want
to have a bandit in my home, if it does happen that you do so, take care not to
come back anymore."
As for me, I received him without reproach and without ridicule, but with a bit of
gravity; and lest he suspect that all that had taken place was only a game, I did
not want to take him for a walk the same day. The next day I saw with great
pleasure that in my company he passed with a triumphant bearing before the same
people who had jeered at him the day before because he was all alone when they met
him. It can be well conceived that he did not threaten me anymore with going out
without me.
It is by these means and others like them that during the short time I was with the
child I got to the point of being able to make him do everything I wanted without
prescribing anything to him, without forbidding him anything, without sermons,
without exhortations, without boring him with useless lessons. Thus, so long as I
spoke, he was satisfied; but he was afraid of my silence. He understood that
something was not going well, and the lesson always came to him from the thing
itself. But let us return.
These constant exercises, left in this way to the direction of nature alone, in
strengthening the body not only do not stultify the mind but, on the contrary, form
the only kind of reason of which the first age is susceptible and which is the most
necessary to any age whatsoever. They teach us to know well the use of our
strength, the relations of our bodies to surrounding bodies, and the use of the
natural instruments which are within our reach and are suitable for our organs. Is
there any stupidity equal to that of a child always raised indoors and under his
mother's eyes who, ignorant of what weight and resistance are,
* In such a case one can without risk demand the truth from a child, for he knows
well then that he could not disguise it, and that, if he dared to tell a lie, he
would be convicted of it on the spot.
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BOOK II
wants to rip up a big tree or lift a boulder? The first time I went out of Geneva,
I wanted to keep up with a galloping horse; I threw stones at Mount Saleve which
was two leagues away from me. Plaything of all the children of the village, I was a
veritable idiot to them. At eighteen one learns in philosophy what a lever is.
There is not a little peasant of twelve who does not know how to use a lever better
than the Academy's premier expert in mechanics. The lessons pupils get from one
another in the schoolyard are a hundred times more useful to them than everything
they will ever be told in class.
Look at a cat entering a room for the first time. He inspects, he looks around, he
sniffs, he does not relax for a moment, he trusts nothing before he has examined
everything, come to know everything. This is just what is done by a child who is
beginning to walk and entering, so to speak, in the room of the world. The whole
difference is that, in addition to the vision which is common to both child and
cat, the former has the hands that nature gave him to aid in observation, and the
latter is endowed by nature with a subtle sense of smell. Whether this disposition
is well or ill cultivated is what makes children adroit or clumsy, dull or alert,
giddy or prudent.
Since man's first natural movements are, therefore, to measure himself against
everything surrounding him and to experience in each object he perceives all the
qualities which can be sensed and relate to him, his first study is a sort of
experimental physics relative to his own preservation, from which he is diverted by
speculative studies before he has recognized his place here on earth. While his
delicate and flexible organs can adjust themselves to the bodies on which they must
act, while his still pure senses are exempt from illusions, it is the time to
exercise both in their proper functions, it is the time to teach the knowledge of
the sensible relations which things have with us. Since everything which enters
into the human understanding comes there through the senses, man's first reason is
a reason of the senses; this sensual reason serves as the basis of intellectual
reason. Our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes. To
substitute books for all that is not to teach us to reason. It is to teach us to
use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know
anything.
To exercise an art one must begin by procuring for oneself the instruments for it;
and, to be able to employ these instruments usefully, one has to make them solid
enough to resist wear. To learn to think. therefore, it is necessary to exercise
our limbs, our senses, our organs, which are the instruments of our intelligence.
And, to get the greatest possible advantage from these instruments, the body which
provides them must be robust and healthy. Thus, far from man's true reason being
formed independently of the body, it is the body's good constitution which makes
the mind's operations easy and sure.
In showing how the long idleness of childhood ought to be employed, I go into the
kind of detail which will appear ridiculous. "Funny lessons," I will be told,
"which, open to your own criticism, are limited to teaching that which no one needs
to learn! Why waste time on the instruction that always comes of itself and costs
neither effort nor care.
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EMILE
What twelve-year-old child does not know all you want to teach yours, and, in
addition, what his masters have taught him?"
Messieurs, you are mistaken. I am giving my pupil instruction in an art that is
very long, very hard, one that your pupils surely do not possess; it is the art of
being ignorant, for the science possessed by him who believes that he knows only
what he does in fact know amounts to very little. You give science—splendid. I busy
myself with the instrument fit for acquiring it. It is said that one day when the
Venetians with great pomp showed their treasure of Saint Mark to a Spanish
ambassador, he, as his only compliment, after looking under the tables, said to
them, "Qui non c' e la radice." r>1 I never see a preceptor displaying the learning
of his disciple without being tempted to say as much to him.
All those who have reflected on the way of Me of the ancients attribute to
gymnastic exercises that vigor of body and soul which distinguishes them most
palpably from the moderns. The way in which Montaigne supports this sentiment shows
that he was powerfully impressed by it. He returns to it endlessly and in countless
ways in speaking of a child's education. To stiffen his soul, he says, his muscles
must be hardened; by becoming accustomed to work, he becomes accustomed to pain;
one must break him to the harshness of exercise in order to train him in the
harshness of dislocations, colics, and all illness. The wise Locke, the good
Rollin, the learned Fleury, the pedant Crousaz— so different among themselves in
everything else—all agree on this single point that there should be much exercise
for children's bodies. It is the most judicious of their precepts; it is the one
which is and always will be the most neglected. I have already spoken sufficiently
of its importance, and since on this point one cannot give better reasons or more
sensible rules than those to be found in Locke's book, I shall content myself with
referring you to it after having taken the liberty of adding some observations to
his.62
The limbs of a growing body ought all to have room in their garments. Nothing ought
to hinder either their movement or their growth; nothing too tight; nothing which
clings to the body; no belts. French dress, constraining and unhealthy for men, is
particularly pernicious for children. The humors, stagnant, arrested in their
circulation, grow rotten in a state of rest which is increased by the inactive and
sedentary life, become corrupt, and cause scurvy, an illness every day more common
among us and almost unknown to the ancients whose way of dressing and living
preserved them from it. The hussar's costume,"3 far from remedying this difficulty,
increases it and, in order to spare children braces, puts pressure on their whole
body. The best thing to do is to leave them in smocks as long as possible, then to
give them a very large garment and not make a point of showing off their figure,
which serves only to deform it. Their defects of body and of mind come almost all
from the same cause.- one wants to make them men before it is time.
There are gay colors and sad colors. The former are more to children's taste. They
are also more flattering to them; and I do not see why one would not consult such
natural fitness in this. But from the
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BOOK II
moment that children prefer a material because it is rich, their hearts are already
abandoned to luxury, to all the whims of opinion; and this taste surely did not
come to them from themselves. I cannot tell you how much the choice of clothing and
the motives of this choice influence education. Not only do blind mothers promise
their children adornment as a reward; one even sees foolish governors threatening
their pupils with a coarser and simpler costume as a punishment. "If you do not
study better, if you don't take better care of your things, you will be dressed
like this little peasant." This is as if they were told, "Know that man is nothing
except by his costume, that your worth is wholly in yours." Is it surprising that
the young profit from such wise lessons, that they esteem only adornment, and that
they judge merit by the exterior only?
If I had to straighten out the views of a child thus spoiled, I would take care
that his richest costumes were his most uncomfortable, that he be always ill at
ease, always constrained in them, always subjected by them in countless ways. I
would make liberty and gaiety flee before his magnificence. If he wanted to join in
the games of other children more simply outfitted, on the spot everything would
stop, everything would disappear. Finally, I would so bore him, I would so satiate
him with his splendor, I would render him so much the slave of his gold-trimmed
costume that I would make it the plague of his life, make him see the darkest
dungeon with less fright than the laying out of his adornment. So long as the child
has not been made the servant of our prejudices, to be at his ease and free is
always his first desire. The simplest garment, the most comfortable, the one which
subjects him least, is always the most precious for him.
There is a habit of the body suitable to exercise and another more suitable to
inaction. The latter, allowing the humors an even and uniform flow, ought to
protect the body from changes in the air. The former, making the body constantly
pass from agitation to rest and from heat to cold, ought to accustom it to those
changes. It follows from this that stay-at-home and sedentary people ought to be
warmly dressed at all times so as to keep the body at a uniform temperature, almost
the same in all seasons and at all hours of the day. On the other hand, those who
come and go, in the wind, in the sun, in the rain, who are very active and spend
most of their time sub dio,^ ought always to be lightly dressed so as to habituate
themselves to all the vicissitudes of the air and all the degrees of temperature
without being uncomfortable in them. I would counsel both not to change costume
according to the seasons, and that will be the constant practice of my Emile. By
this I do not mean that he will wear his winter clothes in the summer, as do
sedentary people, but that he will wear his summer clothes in the winter, as do
working people. This latter practice was that of Sir Isaac Newton during his whole
life, and he lived eighty years.
Little or no headgear in any season. The ancient Egyptians were always bare-headed.
The Persians covered their heads with large tiaras and still cover them with large
turbans, the use of which, according to Chardin, the air of the country makes
necessary. I have mentioned
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EMILE
elsewhere * the distinction that Herodotus made on a battlefield between the skulls
of the Persians and those of the Egyptians. Since it is important, then, that the
bones of the head become harder, more compact, less fragile, and less porous the
better to arm the brain not only against wounds but also against colds,
inflammations, and all the impressions of the air, accustom your children to remain
always bareheaded summer and winter, day and night. If for the sake of cleanliness
and to keep their hair in order you want to give them headgear during the night,
let it be a cap thin enough to see through, similar to the netting with which the
Basques cover their hair. I know well that most mothers, more struck by Chardin's
observation than by my reasons, will believe they find everywhere the air of
Persia; but I did not choose my pupil a European to make an Asian of him.56
In general, children are overdressed, especially during their early age. They
should be hardened to cold rather than to heat. Very cold weather never indisposes
them if one lets them be exposed to it early. But their skin tissue, still too
tender and too slack, leaving too free a passage for perspiration, inevitably makes
them prone to exhaustion in extreme heat. Thus, it is noted that more of them die
in the month of August than in any other month. Moreover, it appears to be a
constant, from the comparison of the northern peoples with the southern, that one
is made more robust by enduring excessive cold than excessive heat. But as the
child grows and his fibers are strengthened, accustom him little by little to brave
the sun's rays. In going by degrees you will harden him without danger to the
ardors of the torrid zone.
Locke, in the midst of the masculine and sensible precepts that "he gives us, falls
back into contradictions one would not expect from so exact a reasoner. The same
man who wants children bathed in icy water in summer does not want them, when they
are heated up, to have cool drinks or to lie down on the ground in damp places.*
But since he wants children's shoes to take in water at all times, will they take
it in less when the child is warm; and can one not make for him the same inductions
about the body in relation to the feet that he makes about the feet in relation to
the hands and about the body in relation to the face? "If you want man to be all
face," I would say to him, "why do you blame me for wanting him to be all feet?" 57
To prevent children from drinking when they are hot, he prescribes accustoming them
to eat a piece of bread as a preliminary to drinking. It is quite strange that when
a child is thirsty he has to be given something to eat. I would prefer to give him
drink when he is hungry. Never will I be persuaded that our first appetites are so
unruly that they cannot be satisfied without exposing ourselves to destruction. If
that were so, mankind would have been destroyed a hundred times before men learned
what must be done to preserve it.
* Lettre a M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles, first edition p. 189.56 t As if little
peasants chose very dry earth to sit or lie on, and as if it had ever been heard
said that the earth's dampness had done any harm to one of them? To hear the
physicians on this point, one would believe savages are completely crippled by
rheumatism.
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BOOK II
Every time Emile is thirsty, I want him given drink. I want him given water, pure
and without any preparation, not even to take the chill off it, even if he is
bathed in sweat and it is the heart of winter. The only care I recommend is to
distinguish the quality of the water. If it is river water, give it to him on the
spot just as it comes from the river. If it is spring water, it must be left for a
time in the air before he drinks it. In hot seasons rivers are hot; it is not the
same with springs which have not had contact with the air. One must wait for them
to get to the temperature of the atmosphere. In the winter, on the contrary, spring
water is in this respect less dangerous than river water. But it is neither natural
nor frequent that one gets in a sweat in the winter, especially out of doors, for
the cold air, constantly striking the skin, represses the sweat within and prevents
the pores from opening enough to give it free passage. Now I intend for Emile to
exercise in winter not next to a good fireplace but outside in open country in the
midst of ice. So long as he gets heated up only in making and throwing snowballs,
we shall allow him to drink when he is thirsty and to continue his exercise after
having drunk without our fearing any accident as a result. But if in some other
exercise he gets into a sweat and is thirsty, let him drink cold water even at that
time. Only arrange it so that you lead him far and slowly in search of his water.
In the kind of cold I mean he will cool off sufficiently in getting there to drink
it without danger. Above all, take these precautions without his noticing them. I
would rather that he be sick sometimes than constantly attentive to his health.
Children must sleep long because their exercise is extreme. The one serves as
corrective to the other. And it is seen that they need both. The time of rest is
night; it has been marked out by nature. It is an established observation that
sleep is calmer and sweeter while the sun is below the horizon and that air heated
by its rays does not keep our senses in so deep a repose. Thus, the most salutary
habit is certainly to get up and go to bed with the sun. It follows from this that
in our climates man and all the animals generally need to sleep longer in winter
than in summer. But civil life is not simple enough, natural enough, exempt enough
from extreme changes and accidents for man properly to get accustomed to this
uniformity to the point of making it necessary to him. Doubtless one must be
subjected to rules. But the first is to be able to break them without risk when
necessity wills. Therefore, do not go and imprudently soften your pupil by allowing
him a peaceful sleep which endures without interruption. Deliver him at first
without hindrance to the law of nature, but do not forget that among us he must be
above that law, that he must be able to go to bed late, get up in the morning, be
abruptly awakened, and spend nights up without getting upset. By going about it
soon enough, by proceeding always gently and gradually, one can form the
temperament by the very things that destroy it when it is submitted to them already
fully formed.
It is important in the first instance to get used to being ill bedded. This is the
way never again to find an uncomfortable bed. In general, the hard life, once
turned into habit, multiplies agreeable sensations; the soft life prepares for an
infinity of unpleasant ones. People raised too
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EMILE
delicately no longer find sleep elsewhere than on down; people accustomed to sleep
on boards find it everywhere. There is no hard bed for him who falls asleep as soon
as he lies down.
A soft bed where one sinks into feathers or eiderdown, so to speak, melts and
dissolves the body. The kidneys, too warmly enveloped, heat up. The results are
stones or other indispositions and, infallibly, a delicate constitution which feeds
them all.
The best bed is the one which provides a better sleep. That is the bed Emile and I
are preparing for ourselves during the day. We do not need to have Persian slaves
brought to us to make our beds; in plowing the soil we are shaking out our
mattresses.
I know from experience that when a child is healthy, one is master of making him
sleep and wake up almost as one wills. When the child is in bed and his babble
bores his nurse, she tells him, "Sleep." This is as though she were to tell him,
"Be healthy," when he is sick. The true means of making him sleep is to bore him
himself. Talk so much that he is forced to keep quiet, and soon he will sleep.
Sermons are always good for something. Preaching to him is about equivalent to
rocking him. But if you do use this narcotic in the evening, be careful not to use
it during the day.
Sometimes I shall wake Emile up, less for fear that he get the habit of sleeping
too long than to accustom him to everything, even to being awakened, even to being
awakened abruptly. What is more, I would have very little talent for my job if I
did not know how to force him to wake himself and get up, so to speak, at my will
without my saying a single word to him.
If he does not sleep enough, I let him get a glimpse of a boring morning for the
next day; and he himself will regard as so much gained all that he can give to
sleep. If he sleeps too much, I give him the prospect of an entertainment to his
taste on waking. Do I want him to wake himself at a certain moment? I say to him,
"Tomorrow at six we are leaving to go fishing. We are going to walk to such and
such a place. Do you want to join us?" He agrees and asks me to wake him. I promise
or I do not promise, according to need. If he wakes up too late, he finds us gone.
Woe, if he does not soon learn to wake himself up on his own.
Further, if it happens—which is rare—that some indolent child has an inclination to
stagnate in laziness, he must not be abandoned to this inclination by which he
would be totally benumbed but must be administered some stimulant which will wake
him up. It is, of course, to be understood that this is not a question of making
him act by force but of moving him by some appetite which draws him to it, and this
appetite taken discriminatingly in the order of nature leads us to two ends at the
same time.
I can imagine nothing the taste, even the rage, for which cannot with a bit of
skill be inspired in children, without vanity, without emulation, without jealousy.
Their vivacity, their imitative spirit suffice; their natural gaiety especially is
an instrument which provides a sure hold, one of which no preceptor ever takes
advantage. In all games, when they are quite persuaded that they are only games,
children endure
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BOOK II
without complaining and even in laughing what they would never otherwise endure
without shedding torrents of tears. Long fasts, blows, burns, fatigues of all kinds
are the amusements of young savages— proof that even pain has a seasoning that can
take away bitterness. But it does not belong to every master to know how to prepare
this stew, nor perhaps to every disciple to savor it without grimace. Here I am
once more, if I do not watch out, lost in the exceptions.
What does not admit of exceptions, however, is man's subjection to pain, to the
ills of his species, to the accidents, to the dangers of life, finally to death.
The more he is familiarized with all these ideas, the more he will be cured of the
importunate sensitivity which only adds to the ill itself the impatience to undergo
it. The more he gets used to the sufferings which can strike him, the more, as
Montaigne would say, the sting of strangeness is taken from them, and also the more
his soul is made invulnerable and hard."'8 His body will be the shield which will
turn away all the arrows by which he might be mortally struck. The very approach of
death not being death, he will hardly feel it as such. He will not, so to speak,
die. He will be living or dead; nothing more. It is of him that the same Montaigne
could say, as he did say of a king of Morocco, that no man has lived so far into
death."'-' Constancy and firmness, like the other virtues, are apprenticeships of
childhood. But it is not by teaching the names of these virtues that one teaches
them to children. It is by making the children taste them without knowing what they
are.
But, apropos of dying, how shall we behave with our pupil concerning the danger of
smallpox? Shall we have him inoculated with it at an early age, or wait for him to
get it naturally? The first choice, more in conformity with our practice, defends
against danger at the age when life is most precious by taking a risk at the age
when life is less so—if, indeed, the name risk can be given to inoculation well
administered.
But the second choice is more in accord with our general principles of letting
nature alone in everything, in the care it is wont to take by itself and which it
abandons as soon as man wants to interfere. The man of nature is always prepared;
let him be inoculated by the master; it will choose the moment better than we
would.
Do not conclude from this that I am against inoculation, for the reasoning on whose
basis I exempt my pupil from it would ill suit your pupils. Your education prepares
them not to escape smallpox at the time they are attacked by it. If you leave its
coming to chance, they will probably die from it. I see that in the various
countries inoculation is resisted the more as it becomes more necessary; and the
reason for this is easily grasped. So I shall hardly deign to treat this question
for my Emile. He will be inoculated, or he will not be, according to times, places,
and circumstances. It is almost a matter of indifference in his case. If he is
given smallpox, one will have the advantage of foreseeing and knowing his illness
ahead of time; that is something. But if he gets it naturally, we will have
preserved him from the doctor. That is even more.60
An exclusive education—an education whose only goal is to distinguish those who
receive it from the people—always gives the preference
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EMILE
to the more costly forms of training over the more common and, consequently, over
the more useful ones. Thus all carefully raised young people learn to ride
horseback because that costs a lot. But almost none of them learns to swim because
it costs nothing, and an artisan can know how to swim as well as anyone. However,
without having gone to the academy, a traveler rides, holds on, and makes use of
the horse adequate to the need. But in water if one does not swim, one drowns; and
one does not swim without having learned. Finally, riding horseback is never a
matter of life or death, whereas nobody is sure of avoiding a danger to which one
is so often exposed as drowning. Emile will be in water as on land. Why should he
not live in all the elements? If he could be taught to fly in the air, I would make
an eagle of him. I would make a salamander of him if a man could be hardened
against fire.
It is feared that in learning to swim a child might drown. If he drowns while he is
learning or because he has not learned, in either case it will be your fault. It is
only vanity which makes us rash. A person is never rash when he is seen by no one.
Emile would not be rash even if the whole universe were watching. Since risk is not
required for practicing swimming, he could learn to cross the Hellespont in a canal
in his father's park. But one must even get used to risk, so as to learn not to be
disturbed by it. This is an essential part of the apprenticeship of which I spoke a
while ago. Moreover, being careful to balance the degree of danger with the amount
of his strength and sharing the danger with him always, I will hardly have to fear
imprudence when my own preservation is also the basis for the care I give to him.
A child is not as big as a man. He has neither a man's strength nor his reason. But
he sees and hears as well, or very nearly as well, as a man. His taste is as
sensitive, although less delicate; and he distinguishes smells as well, although he
does not bring the same sensuality to them. The first faculties which are formed
and perfected in us are the senses. They are, therefore, the first faculties that
ought to be cultivated; they are the only ones which are completely ignored or the
ones which are most neglected.
To exercise the senses is not only to make use of them, it is to learn to judge
well with them. It is to learn, so to speak, to sense; for we know how to touch,
see, and hear only as we have learned.
There are purely natural and mechanical exercises which serve to make the body
robust without giving any occasion for the exercise of judgment. Swimming, running,
jumping, spinning a top, throwing stones, all that is quite good. But have we only
arms and legs? Have we not also eyes and ears; and are these organs superfluous to
the use of the former? Therefore, do not exercise only strength; exercise all the
senses which direct it. Get from each of them all that they can do. Then verify the
impression of one by the other. Measure, count, weigh, compare. Use strength only
after having estimated resistance. Always arrange it so that the estimate of the
effect precedes the use of the means. Interest the child in never making
insufficient or superfluous efforts. If you accustom him to foresee thus the effect
of all his move-
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BOOK II
ments and to set his mistakes right by experience, is it not clear that the more he
acts, the more judicious he will become?
Is there a mass to lift? If he takes too long a lever, he will waste motion. If he
takes too short a one, he will not have enough strength. Experience can teach him
to choose precisely the stick he needs. This wisdom is, hence, not beyond his age.
Is there a load to carry? If he wants to take one as heavy as he can carry and not
try any he cannot lift, will he not be forced to estimate its weight by sight? Does
he know how to compare masses of the same matter and of different size? Let him
choose between masses of the same size and different matters. He will have to set
himself to comparing their specific weights. I have seen a very well-raised young
man who, only after putting it to the test, was willing to believe that a container
full of big pieces of oak was less heavy than the same container filled with water.
We are not masters of the use of all our senses equally. There is one of them—that
is, touch—whose activity is never suspended during waking. It has been spread over
the entire surface of our body as a continual guard to warn us of all that can do
it damage. It is also the one of which, willy-nilly, we acquire the earliest
experience due to this continual exercise and to which, consequently, we have less
need to give a special culture. However, we observe that the blind have a surer and
keener touch than we do; because, not being guided by sight, they are forced to
learn to draw solely from the former sense the judgments which the latter furnishes
us. Why, then, are we not given practice at walking as the blind do in darkness, to
know the bodies we may happen to come upon, to judge the objects which surround us—
in a word, to do at night without light all that they do by day without eyes? As
long as the sun shines, we have the advantage over them. In the dark they are in
their turn our guides. We are blind half of our lives, with the difference that the
truly blind always know how to conduct themselves, while we dare not take a step in
the heart of the night. We have lights, I will be told. What? Always machines? Who
promises you that they will follow you everywhere in case of need? As for me, I
prefer that Emile have eyes in the tips of his fingers than in a candle-maker's
shop.
Are you enclosed in a building in the middle of the night? Clap your hands. You
will perceive by the resonance of the place whether the area is large or small,
whether you are in the middle or in a corner. At half a foot from a wall the air,
circulating less and reflecting more, brings a different sensation to your face.
Stay in place, and turn successively in every direction. If there is an open door,
a light draft will indicate it to you. Are you in a boat? You will know by the way
the air strikes your face not only in what direction you are going but whether the
river's current is carrying you along slow or fast. These observations and
countless others like them can be made well only at night. However much attention
we might want to give to them in daylight, we will be aided or distracted by sight;
they will escape us. Here, meanwhile, we do not even use our hands or a cane. How
much ocular knowledge can be acquired by touch, even without touching anything at
all?
U33]
EMILE
Many night games. This advice is more important than it seems. Night naturally
frightens men and sometimes animals as well.* Reason, knowledge, wit, and courage
deliver few men from the exaction of this tribute. I have seen reasoners, strong-
minded men, philosophers, soldiers intrepid by daylight tremble like women at the
sound of a leaf at night. This fright is attributed to the tales of nurses.61 That
is a mistake. It has a natural cause. What is this cause? The same one which makes
deaf men distrustful and the people li2 superstitious: ignorance of the things
which surround us and of what is going on about us.f Accustomed to perceive objects
from afar and to foresee their impressions in advance, how—when I no longer see
anything around me— would I not suppose there to be countless beings, countless
things in motion which can harm me and from which it is impossible for me to
protect myself? I may very well know that I am secure in the place I am; I never
know it as well as if I actually saw it. I am therefore always subject to a fear
that I do not have in daylight. True, I know that a foreign body can hardly act on
mine without proclaiming itself by some sound. So how alert I constantly keep my
ears! At the slightest sound whose cause I cannot make out, interest in my
preservation immediately brings to my mind everything that most makes me keep on my
guard and consequently everything that is most likely to frighten me.
Do I hear absolutely nothing? That does not make me calm, for, after all, without
noise I can still be surprised. I must assume that things are as they were before,
as they still should be, that I see what I do not see. Compelled thus to set my
imagination in motion, I am soon no longer its master, and what I did to reassure
myself serves only to alarm me more. If I hear a noise, I hear robbers. If I hear
nothing, I see phantoms. The vigilance inspired in me by concern for my
preservation gives me only grounds for fear. Everything that ought to reassure me
exists only in my reason. Instinct, stronger, speaks to me in a man-
* This fright becomes very manifest in great eclipses of the sun. t This is again
another cause well explained by a philosopher whose book I often cite and whose
great views instruct me even more often.
When due to particular circumstances we cannot have an exact idea of distance, and
we can judge objects only by the size of the angle or, rather, of the image they
form in our eyes, then we necessarily make mistakes about the size of these
objects. Everybody has the experience in traveling at night of taking a bush which
is near for a big tree which is far, or of taking a big tree at a distance for a
bush next to one. Similarly, if one does not know the objects by their form and one
cannot in this way have any idea of the distance, one will again necessarily make
mistakes. A fly which passes rapidly by a few inches away from our eyes will appear
to us in this case to be a bird which is at a very great distance. A horse which is
not moving in the middle of a field and is in a posture similar, for example, to
that of a sheep will not appear to us to be anything other than a big sheep, so
long as we do not recognize that it is a horse. But as soon as we have recognized
it, it will at that instant appear to us as big as a horse, and we will rectify our
first judgment on the spot.
Every time, therefore, that one is at night in unknown places where one cannot
judge distance, and where one cannot recognize the form of things due to the
darkness, one will at every instant be in danger of falling into error with respect
to the judgments one makes about the objects which one meets. From this come the
terror and kind of inner fear that the darkness of night causes almost all men to
feel. On this is founded the appearance of specters and gigantic, frightful figures
that so many people say they have seen. Ordinarily one responds to them that these
figures were in their imagination. However, they could really have been in their
eyes, and it is quite possible that they have indeed seen what they say they have
seen; for it must necessarily
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BOOK II
ner quite different. What is the good of thinking that there is nothing to fear,
since then there is nothing to do?
The discovery of the cause of the ill indicates the remedy. In everything habit
kills imagination. Only new objects awaken it. In those one sees every day, it is
no longer imagination which acts, but memory; and that is the reason for the axiom
ab assuetis non fit passio,0* for only by the fire of the imagination are the
passions kindled. Do not, then, reason with him whom you want to cure of loathing
of the dark. Take him out in it often, and rest assured that all the arguments of
philosophy are not equal in value to this practice. Tilers on roofs do not get
dizzy, and one never sees a man who is accustomed to being in the dark afraid in
it.
This is, therefore, a*i additional advantage of our night games. But for these
games to succeed, I cannot recommend enough that there be gaiety in them. Nothing
is so sad as darkness. Do not go and close your child up in a dungeon. Let him be
laughing as he enters the dark; let laughter overtake him again before he leaves
it. While he is still there, let the idea of the entertainments he is leaving and
those he is going to find again forbid him fantastic imaginings which could come
there to seek him out.
There is a stage of life beyond which, in progressing, one retrogresses. I sense
that I have passed that stage. I am beginning again, so to speak, another career.
The emptiness of ripe age, which has made itself felt in me, retraces for me the
steps of the sweet time of an earlier age. In getting old, I become a child again,
and I recall more gladly what I did at ten than at thirty. Readers, pardon me,
therefore, for sometimes drawing my examples from myself, for to do this book well
I must do it with pleasure."4
I was in the country boarding with a minister named M. Lambercier. I had as my
comrade a cousin who was richer than I and who was
happen, every time one can judge an object only by the angle it forms in the eye,
that this unknown object will swell and get larger as one gets nearer to it; and if
it at first appeared to the spectator, who cannot know what he is seeing or judge
at what distance he is seeing it from—if it appeared, I say, at first to be
several feet high when he was twenty or thirty feet away, it must appear several
fathoms high when he is no longer more than a few feet away. This must, indeed,
surprise and frighten him up until he finally gets to touch the object or to
recognize it, for at the very instant he recognizes what it is, that object which
appeared gigantic will suddenly diminish and will no longer appear to be anything
but its real size. But if one flees or does not dare to come close, it is certain
that one will have no other idea of this object than the one of the image it
formed in the eye and that one will have really seen an object gigantic and
frightful by its size and form. The prejudice of specters is, therefore, founded in
nature, and these appearances do not depend, as the philosophers believe,
solely on the imagination. [Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, vol. VI., p. 22.] I have
tried to show in the text how it always depends in part on the imagination, and, as
for the cause explained in this passage, one sees that the habit of walking at
night ought to teach us to distinguish the appearances objects take on in our eyes
in darkness owing to the resemblance of forms and the diversity of distances. When
the air is still lighted enough to let us perceive the contours of objects, and
since there is more air interposed in a greater distance, we ought always to see
these contours less distinctly when the object is farther from us; this suffices by
dint of habit to guarantee us from the error explained here by M. de Buffon.
Whatever explanation one prefers my method is, therefore, always effective; and
this is perfectly confirmed by experience.
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EMILE
treated as an heir, while I, far away from my father, was only a poor orphan. My
big cousin Bernard was a poltroon to a singular degree, especially at night. I
mocked him so much for his fright that M. Lambercier, bored by my boasting, wanted
to put my courage to the test. One autumn evening when it was very dark, he gave me
the key to the temple and told me to go and get from the pulpit the Bible that had
been left there. He added, so as to involve my honor, a few words which put me in
the position of not being able to hang back.
I left without light. If I had had it, things would have perhaps been still worse.
I had to go by way of the cemetery. I crossed it heartily, for so long as I felt I
was in the open air, I never had nocturnal fright.
On opening the door, I heard a certain echoing up in the arch, which I believed
resembled voices and which began to shake my Roman firmness. With the door opened,
I determined to go in, but hardly had I taken a few steps before I stopped. In
perceiving the profound darkness which reigned in this vast place, I was seized by
a terror which made my hair stand on end. I moved back; I went out; I took flight,
trembling all over. I found in the court a little dog named Sultan whose caresses
reassured me. Ashamed of my fright, I retraced my steps, this time, however, trying
to bring along Sultan, who did not want to follow me. I briskly crossed the
threshold and entered the church. Hardly had I gone in again when the fright came
back, but so powerfully that I lost my head; and although the pulpit was to the
right, and I knew it very well, having turned without being aware of it, I sought
it for a long time to the left; I floundered among the pews; I no longer knew where
I was; and unable to find either pulpit or door, I fell into a state of
inexpressible consternation. Finally I perceived the door. I succeeded in getting
out of the temple and made off as I had the first time, fully resolved never to go
in there alone again except by daylight.
I went back as far as the house. About to enter, I made out M. Lambercier's voice
bursting with laughter. I immediately supposed it to be directed at me; and
embarrassed at seeing myself exposed, I hesitated to open the door. In this
interval I heard Mademoiselle Lambercier expressing worry about me, telling the
serving girl to bring the lantern, and M. Lambercier getting ready to come and look
for me escorted by my intrepid cousin, to whom afterward they would without fail
have given all the honor resulting from the expedition. Instantly all my frights
ceased, leaving me only the fright of being encountered in my flight. I ran—I flew—
to the temple without losing my way; without groping around, I got to the pulpit,
mounted it, took the Bible, jumped down, in three bounds was out of the temple,
whose door I even forgot to close. I entered the room, out of breath, threw the
Bible on the table, flustered but palpitating with joy at having been ahead of the
help intended for me.
One might ask if I tell this story as a model to follow and as an example of the
gaiety which I exact in this kind of exercise? No, but I give it as proof that
nothing is more reassuring to someone frightened of shadows in the night than to
hear company, assembled in a neighboring room, laughing and chatting calmly. I
would want that, instead of playing alone with one's pupil in this way, one brings
together many
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good-humored children in the evening, that at first they be sent out not separately
but several together, that no chance be taken with a single child all alone, unless
one is quite sure beforehand that he will not be too frightened.
I can imagine nothing so pleasant and so useful as such games if one is willing to
put a bit of skill into organizing them. In a large room I would make a kind of
labyrinth with tables, chairs, and screens. In the tortuous and complex passages
through this labyrinth, I would set, amidst eight or ten boxes which are decoys,
another box, almost the same, well lined with bonbons. I would describe in clear
but succinct terms the precise place where the right box is to be found. I would
give enough information to nrake it clear for persons more attentive and less giddy
than children.* Then after having made the little competitors draw lots, I would
send them all out, one after the other, until the right box was found. I would take
care to make finding it difficult in proportion to their skill.
Just think of a little Hercules arriving with a box in his hand, full of pride in
his expedition. The box is put on the table and ceremoniously opened. I can already
hear the bursts of laughter, the jeers of the joyous band when, instead of the
candies that were expected, they find, very nicely set out on moss or cotton, a
June bug, a snail, a piece of coal, an acorn, a turnip or some other similar
foodstuff. Other times, in a room freshly whitewashed, we will hang near the wall
some toy, some little decoration; the object will be to go and get it without
touching the wall. Hardly will the one who brings it have returned—however minor
his infraction of the rule—before his maladroitness will be betrayed by the white
at the tip of his cap, at the tip of his shoes, on the edge of his jacket, or on
his sleeve. This is quite enough, perhaps too much, to make the spirit of this kind
of game understood. If you have to be told everything, do not read me.
What advantages will a man thus raised not have over other men at night? Accustomed
to having a good footing in darkness, practiced at handling with ease all
surrounding bodies, his feet and hands will lead him without difficulty in the
deepest darkness. His imagination, full of the nocturnal games of his youth, will
be loath to turn to frightening objects. If he believes he hears bursts of
laughter, instead of belonging to sprites they will be those of his old comrades.
If an assemblage appears, it will not be for him the witches' sabbath but his
governor's room. The night, recalling to him only gay ideas, will never be
frightening for him. Instead of fearing it, he will like it. Is there a military
expedition? He will be ready at any hour, alone as well as with his company. He
will enter Saul's camp, go through it without losing his way, will go up to the
king's tent without awakening anyone, and will return without being noticed. Must
the horses of Rhesus be abducted? Call on him without fear. Among men raised in a
different way you will have difficulty finding a Ulysses.65
* To give them practice in paying attention, never tell them anything but things
which they have a palpable and immediate interest in understanding well—above all,
nothing drawn out, never a superfluous word. But, also, let there be neither
obscurity nor ambiguity in your speech.
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EMILE
I have seen people who wanted to accustom children to be fearless at night by
surprising them. This is a very bad method. It produces an effect exactly the
opposite of the one sought and serves always to make children only more fearful.
Neither reason nor habit can reassure us when we have the idea of a present danger
whose extent and kind cannot be known, or when we fear surprises we have often
experienced. Nevertheless, how are you to ensure that your pupil be always kept out
of the way of such accidents? Here is the best advice, it seems to me, with which
he can be forearmed against them: "In such a case," I would say to my Emile, "you
may justly defend yourself, for the aggressor does not let you judge if he wants to
do you harm or frighten you; and since he has taken the advantage, even flight is
not a refuge for you. Therefore, boldly grab the one who surprises you at night,
man or beast—it makes no difference. Hold on and squeeze him with all your might.
If he struggles, hit him. Do not stint your blows; and whatever he may say or do,
never loosen your hold on him until you know for sure what is going on. Probably
his explanation will show you that there was not much to fear, and this way of
treating jesters should naturally discourage them from trying again."
Although touch is, of all our senses, the one we exercise the most continually, its
judgments nevertheless remain, as I have said, imperfect and more crude than those
of any other sense, because we continually use along with it the sense of sight;
and since the eye reaches the object sooner than the hand, the mind almost always
judges without the latter. On the other hand, precisely because they are most
limited, tactile judgments are surer; for, extending only so far as our hands can
reach, they rectify the giddiness of the other senses which leap far ahead to
objects they hardly perceive, while everything that touch perceives, it perceives
well. In addition, since we join when we please the strength of muscles to the
activity of nerves, we are able to unite judgment of weight and solidity with
judgment of temperature, size, and shape simultaneously in a single sensation. Thus
touch, being of all the senses the one which best informs us about the impression
foreign bodies can make on our own, is the one whose use is the most frequent and
gives us most immediately the knowledge necessary to our preservation.
Since a trained touch supplements sight, why could it not also up to a certain
point supplement hearing, given the fact that sounds set off vibrations which can
be sensed by touch in sonorous bodies? In placing a hand on the body of a cello,
one can, without the aid of eyes or ears, distinguish solely by the way the wood
vibrates and quivers whether the sound it produces is low or high, whether it comes
from the A string or the C string. Let the senses be trained in these differences.
I have no doubt that with time one could become sensitive enough to be able to hear
an entire air with the fingers. And if this is the case, it is clear that one could
easily speak to the deaf with music, for sounds and rhythms, no less susceptible of
regular combinations than articulations and voices, can similarly be taken for the
elements of speech.
There are practices which dull the sense of touch and make it blunter. Others, on
the contrary, sharpen it and make it keener and more deli-
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cate. The former, those that join much motion and force to constant contact with
hard bodies, make the skin rough and callous and take the natural feeling away from
it. The latter are those which vary this same feeling by a light and frequent
contact, so that the mind, attentive to impressions incessantly repeated, acquires
facility at judging all their modifications. This difference is palpable in the use
of musical instruments. The hard and bruising touch of the cello, the bass, even of
the violin, in making the fingers more flexible, hardens their extremities. The
smooth and polished touch of the harpsichold makes them as flexible and more
sensitive at the same time. In this, therefore, the harpsichord is to be preferred.
It is important that the skin be hardened to the impressions of, and able to brave
changes in, the air, for it defends all the rest, except that I would not want the
hand to get hardened from too servile an application to the same labors nor its
skin, become almost bony, to lose that exquisite sensitivity that permits it to
recognize the bodies over which one passes it and which in the dark sometimes cause
us to shudder—in ways that differ according to the kind of contact.
Why must my pupil be forced always to have a cow's skin under his feet? What harm
would there be if in case of need his own skin were able to serve him as a sole? In
this part of the body the delicacy of the skin clearly can never be useful for
anything and can often do much harm. Awakened at midnight in the heart of winter by
the enemy in the city, the Genevans found their muskets before their shoes. If none
of them had known how to march barefoot, who knows whether Geneva might not have
been taken? 6"
Let us always arm man against unexpected accidents. In the morning let Emile run
barefoot in all seasons, in his room, on the stairs, in the garden. Far from
reproaching him, I shall imitate him. I shall take care only that glass be removed.
I shall soon speak of manual labor and games. Beyond that let him learn to do all
the steps which help the body's development, to find a comfortable and stable
posture in all positions. Let him know how to jump long and high, to climb a tree,
to get over a wall. Let him learn to keep his balance; let all his movements and
gestures be ordered according to the laws of equilibrium, long before the study of
statics is introduced to explain it all to him. By the way his foot touches the
ground and his body rests on his legs, he ought to be able to feel whether he is
well or ill positioned. An assured bearing is always graceful, and the firmest
postures are also the most elegant. If I were a dancing master, I would not perform
all the monkeyshines of Marcel,* good only for that country where he engages in
them. Instead of eternally busying my pupil with leaps, I would take him to the
foot of a cliff. There I would show him what attitude he must take, how he must
bear his body and his head, what
* Celebrated dancing master of Paris, who, knowing his world well, played the fool
out of cunning and attributed to his art an importance which others feigned to find
ridiculous, but for which, at bottom, they respected him very greatly. In another
art, no less frivolous, one can also today see an actor-artist play the man of
importance and the madman and succeed no less well. This is the sure method in
France. True talent, simpler and with less charlatanry, does not make its fortune
there. Modesty is there the virtue of fools.
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EMILE
movements he must make, in what way he must place now his foot, now his hand, so as
to follow lightly the steep, rough, uneven paths and to bound from peak to peak in
climbing up as well as down. I would make him the emulator of a goat rather than of
a dancer at the Opera.
As touch concentrates its operations in the immediate vicinity of man, so sight
extends its operations beyond him. That is what makes the operations of sight
deceptive. At a glance a man embraces half of his horizon. In this multitude of
simultaneous sensations and the judgments they call forth, how is it possible not
to be deceived by any? Thus of all our senses sight is the most defective,
precisely because it is the most extended; and far in advance of all the others,
its operations are too quick and too vast to be rectified by them. What is more,
the very illusions of perspective are necessary for us to come to a knowledge of
extension and to compare its parts. Without false appearances we would see nothing
in perspective; without the gradations of size and light we could not estimate any
distance, or, rather, there would be none for us. If, of two equal trees, the one a
hundred paces from us appeared as large and as distinct as the one at ten, we would
place them side by side. If we perceived all the dimensions of objects in their
true measure, we would see no space, and everything would appear to be in our eye.
The sense of sight has only a single measure for judging the size of objects and
their distance—namely, the width of the angle they make in our eye; and since that
angle width is a simple effect of a complex cause, the judgment it calls forth
leaves each particular cause indeterminate or becomes necessarily defective. For
how is it possible to distinguish by simple sight whether the angle by which I see
one object as smaller than another is so because this first object is actually
smaller or because it is more distant?
Therefore, a method contrary to the former must be followed here. Instead of
simplifying the sensation, double it, always verify it by another. Subject the
visual organ to the tactile organ, and repress, so to speak, the impetuosity of the
former sense by the heavy and regular step of the latter. If we fail to submit
ourselves to this practice, our estimated measurements are very inexact. There is
no precision in our glance for judging heights, lengths, depths, and distances. And
the proof that it is not so much the fault of the sense as it is of its use is that
engineers, surveyors, architects, masons, and painters generally have a much surer
glance than we do and appraise the measurements of extension with more exactness.
Because their professions give them the experience that we neglect to acquire, they
remove the ambiguity of the angle by the appearances which accompany it and which
determine more exactly to their eyes the relation of that angle's two causes.
Anything which gives movement to the body without constraining it is always easy to
obtain from children. There are countless means of interesting them in measuring,
knowing, and estimating distances. Here is a very tall cherry tree. How shall we go
about picking the cherries? Will the barn ladder do for that? Here is quite a large
stream. How shall we cross it? Will one of the planks from the courtyard reach both
banks? We would like to fish from our windows in the mansion's
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BOOK II
ponds. How many spans ought our line to have? I would like to hang a swing between
these two trees: will a rope two fathoms long be enough for us? I am told that in
the other house our room will be twenty-five square feet. Do you believe that it
will suit us? Will it be larger than this one? We are very hungry. There are two
villages. At which of the two will we arrive sooner for dinner? Et cetera.
There was an indolent and lazy child who was to be trained in running—a child not
of himself drawn to this exercise or to any other, although he was intended for a
military career. He had persuaded himself, I do not know how, that a man of his
rank ought to do and know nothing, and that his noble birth was going to take the
place of arms and legs as well as of every kind of merit. To make of such a
gentleman a light-footed Achilles, the skill of Chiron himself would have hardly
sufficed. The difficulty was all the greater since I wanted to prescribe to him
absolutely nothing. I had banished from among my rights exhortations, promises,
threats, emulation, the desire to be conspicuous. How could I give him the desire
to run without saying anything to him? To run myself would have been a very
uncertain means and one subject to disadvantages. Moreover, the intention was also
to get for him from this exercise some object of instruction, so as to accustom the
operations of the machine and those of judgment always to work harmoniously. Here
is how I went about it—I, that is to say, the man who speaks in this example.
In going walking with him in the afternoon I sometimes put in my pocket two cakes
of a kind he liked a lot. We each ate one of them during the walk,* and we came
back quite contented. One day he noticed that I had three cakes. He could have
eaten six of them comfortably. He dispatched his promptly in order to ask me for
the third. "No," I said to him, "I could very well eat it myself, or we could
divide it. But I prefer to see those two little boys there compete for it by
running." I called them, showed them the cake, and proposed the condition to them.
They asked for nothing better. The cake was set on a large stone which served as
the finish. The course was marked out. We went and sat down. At a given signal the
little boys started. The victor seized the cake and ate it without mercy before the
eyes of the spectators and the vanquished.
This entertainment was better than the cake, but at first it did not register and
produced nothing. I did not give up, nor did I hurry; the education of children is
a vocation in which one must know how to lose time in order to gain it. We
continued our walks. Often we took three cakes, sometimes four, and from time to
time there was one, even two, for the runners. If the prize was not big, those who
competed for it were not ambitious. The one who won it was praised and given a
celebration; it was all done with ceremony. To provide variety and increase
interest, I marked off a longer course. I allowed several contestants. Hardly
* Walk in the country, as will be seen immediately. The public walks of cities are
pernicious for children of both sexes. It is there that they begin to become vain
and to want to be looked at. It is in the Luxembourg, the Tuileries, especially the
Palais-Royal, that the brilliant young of Paris go to get that impertinent and
foppish air which makes them so ridiculous and causes them to be hooted and
detested throughout Europe.
[Ml]
EMILE
were they in the lanes when all the passers-by stopped to see them. Acclamations,
shouts, and clapping cheered them on. I sometimes saw my little fellow tremble, get
up, and shout when one was near to catching up with or passing another. These were
for him the Olympic games.
However, sometimes the contestants cheated. They held onto or tripped one another
or pushed pebbles in one another's way. That gave me the occasion to separate them
and make them start from different points, although at equal distances from the
goal. The reason for this provision will soon be seen, for I am going to treat this
important affair in great detail.
Irritated by always seeing cakes, which he desired very much for himself, eaten
before his eyes, the knight finally got into his head the suspicion that running
well could be good for something; and, seeing that he also had two legs, he began
to take a try in secret. I was careful not to see a thing. But I understood that my
stratagem had worked. When he believed himself to be up to it, and I had read his
thought ahead of him, he affected to importune me for the remaining cake. I refused
him. He was stubborn and, in a vexed tone, said to me finally: "Very well, put it
on the stone, mark out the field, and we shall see." "Good," I said to him,
laughing. "Does a knight know how to run? You will get a bigger appetite and
nothing to satisfy it with." Goaded by my mockery, he made an effort and carried
off the prize, all the more easily since I had made the lists very short and had
taken care to keep the best runner away. It can be conceived how, this first step
made, it was easy for me to keep him on his toes. Soon he got such a taste for this
exercise that without favor he was almost sure of vanquishing my little scamps at
running, however long the course.
This accomplishment produced another of which I had not dreamed. When he had rarely
carried off the prize, he almost always ate it alone, as did his competitors. But,
in accustoming himself to victory, he became generous and often shared with the
vanquished. That provided a moral observation for me, and I learned thereby what
the true principle of generosity is.
Continuing with him to mark in different places the points from which each boy was
to begin at the same time, without his noticing it I made the distances unequal.
Thus one boy, having to cover more ground than another to get to the same goal, had
a visible disadvantage. But although I left the choice to my disciple, he did not
know how to avail himself of the opportunity. Without bothering about the distance,
he always preferred the path that looked good; so that, easily foreseeing his
choice, I was practically the master of making him lose or win the cake at will,
and this skill also had its uses for more than one end. However, since my plan was
that he notice the difference, I tried to make it evident to his senses. But though
he was indolent when calm, he was so lively in his games and distrusted me so
little that I had the greatest difficulty in making him notice that I was cheating.
Finally I succeeded despite his giddiness. He reproached me for it. I said to him,
"What are you complaining about? With a gift that is within my pleasure to give, am
I not master of my conditions? Who is forcing you to run? Did I promise to make
equal lanes for you? Have you not the choice? Take
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BOOK II
the shorter one. Nobody is preventing you. How do you not see that it is you I am
favoring, and that the inequality you are grumbling about is entirely to your
advantage if you know how to avail yourself of it?" This was clear; he understood
it; and to choose he had to look more closely. At first he wanted to count the
paces. But measurement by a child's pace is slow and defective. Moreover, I planned
it so that the number of races on a single day was multiplied; and then, the play
becoming a sort of passion, he regretted to lose, in measuring the lanes, the time
intended to be used for running them. The vivacity of childhood adjusts itself
poorly to these delays. He practiced himself, therefore, at seeing better, at
estimating a distance better by sight. Then I had little difficulty in extending
and nourishing this taste. Finally a few months of tests and corrected errors
formed the visual compass in him to such an extent that when I told him to think of
a cake on some distant object, he had a glance almost as sure as a surveyor's
chain.
Since sight is, of all the senses, the one from which the mind's judgments can
least be separated, much time is needed to learn how to see. Sight must have been
compared with touch for a long time to accustom the former to give us a faithful
report of shapes and distances. Without touch, without progressive movement, the
most penetrating eyes in the world would not be able to give us any idea of
extension. The entire universe must be only a point for an oyster. It would not
appear to it as anything more even if a human soul were to inform this oyster. It
is only by dint of walking, grasping, counting, of measuring dimensions that one
learns to estimate them. But also if one always measured, sense, always relying on
the instrument, would not acquire any exactness. Neither must the child go all of a
sudden from measurement to estimation. At first, continuing to compare part by part
what he would not know how to compare all at once, he must substitute for precise
divisors estimated ones and, instead of always applying the measure with his hand,
get accustomed to applying it with his eyes alone. I would, however, want his first
operations to be verified by real measures in order that he correct his errors, and
that if some false appearance remains in the sense, he learn to rectify it by a
better judgment. There are natural measures which are almost the same in all places
—a man's pace, his outstretched arms, his stature. When the child estimates the
height of a story, his governor can serve him as measuring rod; if he estimates the
height of a steeple, let him measure it against houses. If he wants to know the
number of leagues covered by a road, let him count the hours it takes to walk it.
And, above all, let nothing of all this be done for him, but let him do it himself.
One could not learn to judge the extension and the size of bodies well without also
getting to know their shapes and even learning to imitate them; for, at bottom,
this imitation depends absolutely only on the laws of perspective, and one can
estimate extension by its appearances only if one has some feeling for these laws.
Children, who are great imitators, all try to draw. I would want my child to
cultivate this art, not precisely for the art itself but for making his eye exact
and his hand flexible. And in general it is of very little importance that he know
this or that exercise, provided that his senses acquire the per-
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EMILE
spicacity and his body the good habits one gains by this exercise. I will,
therefore, carefully avoid giving him a drawing master who would give him only
imitations to imitate and would make him draw only from drawings. I want him to
have no other master than nature and no other model than objects. I want him to
have before his eyes the original itself and not the paper representing it, to
sketch a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man, so that he gets
accustomed to observing bodies and their appearances well and not to taking false
and conventional imitations for true imitations. I will even divert him from
drawing from memory in the absence of the objects until their exact shapes are well
imprinted on his imagination by frequent observations, for fear that, by
substituting bizarre and fantastic shapes for the truth of things, he will lose the
knowledge of proportions and the taste for the beauties of nature.07
I know that in this way he will dabble for a long time without making anything
recognizable; that the artist's elegance of contour and light touch he will get
late, and discernment in picturesque effects and good taste in drawing, perhaps
never. On the other hand, he will certainly develop a more accurate glance, a surer
hand, the knowledge of the true relations of size and shape which exist among
animals, plants, and natural bodies, and a quicker capacity for experiencing the
play of perspective. This is precisely what I wanted to accomplish, and my
intention is that he be able not so much to imitate objects as to know them. I
prefer that he show me an acanthus plant and sketch the foliage of a capital less
well.
Moreover, in this exercise as in all the others, I do not want my pupil to be the
only one to have fun. I want to make it even more agreeable for him by constantly
sharing it with him. I do not want him to have any emulator other than me, but I
will be his emulator without respite and without risk. That will put interest in
his occupations without causing jealousy between us. I will take up the pencil
following his example. I will use it at first as maladroitly as he. Were I an
Apelles,88 I would now be only a dabbler. I will begin by sketching a man as
lackeys sketch them on walls: a line for each arm, a line for each leg, and the
fingers thicker than the arm. Quite a while later one or the other of us will
notice this disproportion. We will observe that a leg has thickness, that this
thickness is not the same all over, that the arm has its length determined by
relation to the body, etc. In this progress I will at very most advance along with
him, or I will be so little ahead of him that it will always be easy for him to
catch up with me and often to surpass me. We shall have colors, brushes. We shall
try to imitate the coloring of objects and their whole appearance as well as their
shape. We shall color, paint, dabble. But, in all our dabblings, we shall not stop
spying on nature; we shall never do anything except under the master's eye.
We were in want of adornment for our room. Here it is found. I have our drawings
framed. I have them covered with fine glass so that they no longer can be touched,
and each of us, seeing them remain in the state in which we put them, will have an
interest in not neglecting his own. I arrange them in order around the room, each
drawing re-
[M4]
BOOK II
peated twenty, thirty times, and each copy showing the author's progress, from the
moment when a house is only an almost formless square until its facade, its
profile, its proportions, and its shadows are present in the most exact truth.
These gradations cannot fail constantly to present pictures of interest to us and
objects of curiosity for others and to excite ever more our emulation. On the
first, the crudest, of these drawings I put quite brilliant, well-gilded frames
which enhance them. But when the imitation becomes more exact, and the drawing is
truly good, then I give it nothing more than a very simple black frame. It needs no
adornment other than itself, and it would be a shame for the border to get part of
the attention the object merits. Thus each of us aspires to the honor of the plain
frame, and when one wants to express contempt for a drawing of the other, he
condemns it to the gilded frame. Someday perhaps these gilded frames will serve as
proverbs for us, and we shall wonder at how many men do themselves justice in
providing such frames for themselves.
I have said that geometry is not within the reach of children. But it is our fault.
We are not aware that their method is not ours, and that what becomes for us the
art of reasoning, for them ought to be only the art of seeing. Instead of giving
them our method, we would do better to take theirs. For our way of learning
geometry is an affair just as much of imagination as of reasoning. When the
proposition is stated, it is necessary to imagine its demonstration—that is to say,
to find of which proposition already known this one must be a consequence and, out
of all the consequences that can be drawn from that same proposition, to choose
precisely the one required.
In this way the most exact reasoner, if he is not inventive, has to stop short. So
what is the result of this? Instead of our being made to find the demonstrations,
they are dictated to us. Instead of teaching us to reason, the master reasons for
us and exercises only our memory.
Make exact figures, combine them, place them on one another, examine their
relations. You will find the whole of elementary geometry in moving from
observation to observation, without there being any question of definitions or
problems or any form of demonstration other than simple superimposition. As for me,
I do not intend to teach geometry to Emile; it is he who will teach it to me; I
will seek the relations, and he will find them, for I will seek them in such a way
as to make him find them. For example, instead of using a compass to draw a circle,
I shall draw it with a point at the end of a string turning on a pivot. After that,
when I want to compare the radii among themselves, Emile will ridicule me and make
me understand that the same string, always taut, cannot have drawn unequal
distances.
If I want to measure an angle of sixty degrees, I describe from the vertex of this
angle not an arc but an entire circle, for with children nothing must ever be left
implicit. I find that the portion of the circle contained between the two sides of
the angle is one-sixth of the circle. After that I describe from the same vertex
another larger circle, and I find that this second arc is still one-sixth of its
circle. I describe a third concentric circle on which I make the same test, and I
continue thus
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EMILE
on new circles—until Emile, shocked by my stupidity, informs me that each arc, big
or little, contained by the same angle, will always be one-sixth of its circle,
etc. Now it will soon be time to use the protractor.
To prove that adjacent angles are equal to two right angles, one describes a
circle. I, on the contrary, arrange it so that Emile first notes this in the
circle; and then I say to him, "If the circle were taken away and the right lines
were left, would the angles' size have changed?" Et cetera.
People neglect the exactness of the figures; it is presupposed, and one
concentrates on the demonstration. With us, on the contrary, the issue will never
be demonstration. Our most important business will be to draw lines very straight,
very exact, very equal—to make a very perfect square, to trace a very round circle.
To verify the exactness of the figure, we shall examine it in all its properties
which are grasped by the senses, and this will give us the opportunity to discover
new ones every day. We shall get two semicircles by folding along the diameter; the
halves of the square, by folding along the diagonal. We shall compare our two
figures to see whose edges fit most exactly and, consequently, which is best made.
We shall argue whether this equality of division ought always to be found in
parallelograms, in trapezoids, etc. We shall sometimes attempt to foresee the
success of the experiment before making it; we shall try to find reasons, etc.
Geometry is for my pupil only the art of using the ruler and the compass well. He
ought not to confuse geometry with drawing, in which he will use neither of these
instruments. The ruler and the compass will be kept under lock and key, and he will
be granted the use of them only rarely and for a short time, so that he does not
get accustomed to dabbling with them. But we can sometimes take our figures on our
walks and chat about what we have done or want to do.
I shall never forget seeing at Turin a young man who had in his childhood been
taught the relations between contours and surface areas by being given the choice
every day of waffles with equal perimeters done in all the geometric figures. The
little glutton had exhausted the art of Archimedes in finding out in which there
was the most to eat.
When a child plays with the shuttlecock, he practices his eye and arm in accuracy;
when he whips a top, he increases his strength by using it but without learning
anything. I have sometimes asked why the same games of skill men have are not given
to children: tennis, croquet, billiards, the bow, football, musical instruments. I
was answered that some of these games are beyond a child's strength and that his
limbs and his organs are not sufficiently developed for the others. I find these
reasons poor: a child does not have a man's height but nonetheless is able to wear
clothes made like a man's. I do not mean that he should play with our cues on a
billiard table three feet high; I do not mean that he should hit the ball around in
our courts, or that his little hand should be weighed down by a tennis racket; but
I mean that he should play in a room where the windows are protected, that he
should use only soft balls, that his first rackets should be of wood, then of
sheepskin, and finally strung with catgut, commensurate with his progress. You will
prefer shuttlecock because it is less tiring and without danger.
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BOOK II
You are wrong in both of these reasons. Shuttlecock is a woman's game. But there is
not a woman whom a moving ball does not cause to flee. Women's fair skins ought not
to be hardened to bruises, and it is not contusions that their faces await. But we,
made to be vigorous, do we believe we can become so painlessly? And of what defense
will we be capable if we are never attacked? One is always lax in playing games in
which one can be maladroit without risk. A falling shuttlecock does not harm
anyone; but nothing arouses the arm like having to cover the head; nothing makes
the glance so accurate as having to protect the eyes. To bound from one end of the
room to the other, to judge a ball's bounce while still in the air, to return it
with a hand strong and sure—such games are less suitable for a grown man than
useful for forming him.
A child's fibers are, it is said, too soft. They have less spring, but they are
also more pliant. His arm is weak, but, still, it is an arm; one ought to be able
to do with it, proportionately, all that is done with another similar machine.
Children's hands have no dexterity; that is why I want it given to them. A man as
little practiced as they would have no more. We can know the use of our organs only
after having employed them. It is only long experience which teaches us to turn
ourselves to account, and this experience is the true study to which we cannot
apply ourselves too soon.
Everything which is done can be done. Now, nothing is more common than seeing
adroit and well-built children having the same agility in their limbs as a man can
have. At almost every fair they are seen doing balancing acts, walking on their
hands, leaping, tightrope dancing. For how many years have companies of children
attracted spectators to the Comedie Italienne for their ballet? Who has not heard
in Germany and in Italy of the pantomime company of the celebrated Nicolini? Has
anyone ever noticed in these children less developed movements, less graceful
attitudes, a less exact ear, a dance less light than in fully formed dancers? Does
their having at first thick, short, hardly mobile fingers and chubby hands hardly
capable of grasping anything prevent many children from knowing how to write or
draw at an age when others do not yet know how to hold a pencil or pen? All of
Paris still remembers the little English girl who at ten performed marvels on the
harpsichord.* At the home of a magistrate I saw his son—a little fellow of eight
who was put on the table at dessert like a statue amidst the plates—play a violin
almost as big as he was. The quality of his execution surprised even the artists.
All these examples and a hundred thousand others prove, it seems to me, that the
supposed ineptitude of children at our exercises is imaginary and that, if they are
not seen to succeed at some, it is because they have never been given practice in
them.
I will be told that I fall here, with respect to the body, into the mistake of
premature culture of children which I criticize with respect to the mind. The
difference is very great, for progress in one of these areas is only apparent, but
in the other it is real. I have proved that the
* A little boy of seven has since that time performed even more astonishing ones."
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EMILE
intelligence children appear to have, they do not have; but all that they appear to
do, they in fact do. Moreover, it ought always to be borne in mind that all this is
or ought to be only a game, an easy and voluntary direction of the movements nature
asks of children, an art of varying their play to render it more pleasant to them
without the least constraint ever turning it into work. Really, what will they play
with that I cannot turn into an object of instruction for them? And if I cannot,
provided that they play without causing any problem and the time passes, their
progress in everything is not important for the present; whereas, those who feel
that, no matter what, they just have to teach them this or that always find it
impossible to succeed without constraint, without quarreling, and without boredom.
What I have said about the two senses whose use is the most continuous and the most
important can serve to exemplify the way of exercising the others. Sight and touch
are applied equally to bodies at rest and moving bodies; but since it is only
disturbance of the air which can arouse the sense of hearing, it is only a body in
motion which makes noise or sound, and if everything were at rest, we would never
hear anything. At night, therefore, when we ourselves move only so much as we
please and consequently have only moving bodies to fear, it is important for us to
have an alert ear, to be able to judge by the sensation which strikes us whether
the body causing it is big or little, far or near, whether its motion is violent or
weak. When air is disturbed, it is subject to repercussions which reflect it and
which, producing echoes, repeat the sensation and make the loud or resonant body
heard in a place other than where it is. If in a plain or a valley one puts one's
ear to the ground, one hears the voices of men and the hoofs of horses much farther
away than when one stands up.
As we have compared sight to touch, it is similarly good to compare it to hearing
and to know which of the two impressions, starting out from the same body at the
same time, first reaches the organ that perceives it. When one sees a cannon's
fire, one can still find cover from the shot; but so soon as one hears the noise,
there is no longer time; the ball is there. The distance from which thunder is
coming can be judged by the time which passes from the lightning to the clap.
Arrange things so that the child has knowledge of all these experiments, that he
makes all those within his reach, and that he finds the others by induction. But I
prefer a hundred times over his being ignorant of them to your having to tell them
to him.
We have an organ which corresponds to hearing—namely, the voice. We do not
similarly have one which corresponds to sight; and we do not transmit colors as we
do sounds. This is one more means to cultivate the former sense, by using the
active organ and the passive organ to exercise one another reciprocally.
Man has three kinds of voice—the speaking or articulate voice, the singing or
melodic voice, and the passionate or accentuated voice, which serves as language to
the passions and which animates song and word. The child has these three kinds of
voice as does the man, but without knowing how to join them in the same way. He
has, as we do, laughter, cries, groans, exclamations, wailing; but he does not know
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BOOK II
how to blend their inflections with the two other voices. A perfect music is one
which best brings together these three voices. Children are incapable of this
music, and their singing never has soul. Similarly, in the spoken voice their
language has no accent. They shout, but they do not accentuate; and as there is
little energy in their speech, there is little accent in their voice. Our pupil
will speak even more plainly and simply, because his passions, not yet awakened,
will not blend their language with his. Therefore, do not go giving him roles from
tragedy and comedy to recite, or wish to teach him, as they say, to declaim. He
will have too much sense to know how to give a tone to things he cannot understand
or to give expression to feelings he never experienced.
Teach him to speak plainly and clearly, to articulate well, to pronounce exactly
and without affectation, to know and follow grammatical accent and prosody, always
to employ enough voice to be heard but never to employ more than is required, a
defect common in children raised in colleges. In all things, nothing superfluous.
Similarly in singing, make his voice exact, even, flexible, resonant, his ear
sensitive to rhythm and harmony, but nothing more. Imitative and theatrical music
is not for his age. I would not even want him to sing words. If he wanted to, I
would try to write songs especially for him, interesting for his age and as simple
as his ideas.
It can well be believed that as I am in so little hurry to teach him to read
writing, I will not be in a hurry to teach him to read music either. Let us set
aside an effort of attention too great for his brain and not rush to fix his mind
on conventional signs. This, I admit, seems to involve a difficulty, for although
the knowledge of notes does not at first appear more necessary for knowing how to
sing than does knowledge of letters for knowing how to speak, there is, however,
this difference: in speaking we transmit our own ideas, while in singing we
transmit hardly anything but others' ideas. Now, to transmit them, one must read
them.
But in the first place, instead of reading them, one can hear them, and a song is
transmitted with even more fidelity to the ear than to the eye. Moreover, in order
to know music well, it does not suffice to transmit it; it is necessary to compose
it. The one ought to be learned with the other; otherwise one never knows music
well. Train your little musician at first in making very regular, very well-
cadenced phrases; then in connecting them together by a very simple modulation;
finally, in marking their different relations by correct punctuation, which is done
by the good choice of cadences and rests. Above all, never a bizarre song, never a
passionate one, and never an expressive one. Always a lilting and simple melody,
always deriving from the key's basic notes, and always emphasizing the bass so much
that he feels it and can accompany it without difficulty; for, to form the voice
and the ear, he ought to sing only with the harpsichord.
To mark the sounds better, one articulates them by pronouncing them; hence, the
practice of sol-faing with certain syllables. To distinguish the degrees of the
scale, one must give names both to them and to the fixed starting points of the
different scales; hence the names of the intervals and also the letters of the
alphabet with which the
[*49]
EMILE
keys of the harpsichord and the notes of the scale are marked. C and A designate
fixed, invariable sounds, which are always produced by the same harpsichord keys.
Do and la are something else. Do is without exception the tonic of a major mode or
the mediant of a minor mode. La is without exception the tonic of a minor mode or
the sixth of a major mode. Thus the letters mark the immutable terms of our musical
system's relations, and the syllables mark the homologous terms of the similar
relations in the various keys. The letters indicate the harpsichord's keys, and the
syllables, the degrees of the mode. French musicians have strangely mixed up these
distinctions. They have confused the meaning of the syllables with the meaning of
the letters, and by uselessly doubling the designations of the keys, they have not
left any to express the degrees of the scale; so that for them do and C are always
the same thing, which they are not and should not be, for then what would be the
use of C? Thus their way of sol-faing is excessively difficult without being of any
use and without presenting any distinct idea to the mind, since by this method the
two syllables do and mi, for example, can equally signify a major, minor, augmented
or diminished third. By what strange fatality is the country where the finest books
in the world on music are written precisely the one where music is learned with
most difficulty? 7n
Let us follow a simpler and clearer practice with our pupil. Let there be for him
only two modes, the relations of which are always the same and always indicated by
the same syllables. Whether he sings or plays an instrument, let him know how to
build his mode on each of the twelve notes that can be used as its base; and,
whether one is in the key of D, C, G, etc., let the last note always be do or la
according to the mode. In this way he will always comprehend you, the mode's
essential relations for singing and playing in tune will always be present to his
mind, and his execution will be more accurate and his progress more rapid. There is
nothing more bizarre than what the French call sol-faing naturally. This separates
the ideas from the thing and substitutes for them ideas alien to it that are only
misleading. Nothing is more natural than to transpose when one sol-fas, if the mode
is transposed. But this is too much about music. Teach it as you wish, provided
that it is never anything but play.
Now we are well informed about the character of foreign bodies in relation to our
own, about their weight, shape, color, solidity, size, distance, temperature, rest,
and motion. We are informed about those it is suitable for us to be near or to keep
at a distance, about the way we have to go about overcoming their resistance or
setting up a resistance against them which keeps us from being injured. But that is
not enough. Our own body is constantly being used up and needs constantly to be
renewed. Although we have the faculty of changing other bodies into our own
substance, the choice among them is not a matter of indifference. Everything is not
food for man; and, of the substances which can be, there are ones more or less
suitable for him according to the constitution of his species, according to the
climate he inhabits, according to his individual temperament, and according to the
way of life prescribed to him by his station.
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BOOK II
We would die of hunger or be poisoned if, to choose the nourishment suitable to us,
we had to wait until experience had taught us to know it and choose it. But the
supreme goodness, which has made the pleasure of beings capable of sensation the
instrument of their preservation, informs us what suits our stomach by what pleases
our palate. Naturally there is no doctor surer for man than his own appetite; and,
regarding its primitive state, I do not doubt that the foods it then found most
pleasant were also the healthiest.
What is more, the Author of things provides not only for the needs He gives us but
also for those we give ourselves; and it is in order to place desire always at the
side of need that He causes our tastes to change and be modified with our ways of
life. The farther we are removed from the state of nature, the more we lose our
natural tastes; or, rather, habit gives us a second nature that we substitute for
the first to such an extent that none of us knows this first nature any more.
It follows from this that the most natural tastes ought also to be the simplest,
for it is they which are most easily transformed; while by being sharpened and
inflamed by our whims, they get a form which can no longer be changed. The man who
is not yet of any country will adapt himself without difficulty to the practices of
any country whatsoever, but the man of one country can no longer become the man of
another.
This appears true to me in every sense, and still more so when applied to taste
strictly speaking. Our first food is milk. We get accustomed to strong flavors only
by degrees; at first they are repugnant to us. Fruits, vegetables, herbs, and
finally some meats grilled without seasoning and without salt constituted the
feasts of the first men.* The first time a savage drinks wine, he grimaces and
throws it away; and even among us whoever has lived to twenty without tasting
fermented liquors can no longer accustom himself to them. We would all be
abstemious if we had not been given wine in our early years. In sum, the simpler
our tastes, the more universal they are. The most common repugnances are to
composite dishes. Has anyone ever been seen to have a disgust for water or bread?
That is the trace left by nature; that is, therefore, also our rule. Let us
preserve in the child his primary taste as much as is possible. Let his nourishment
be common and simple; let his palate get acquainted only with bland flavors and not
be formed to an exclusive taste.
I am not investigating here whether this way of life is healthier or not; that is
not the way I am looking at it. For me to prefer it, it suffices to know that it
conforms most to nature and is the one most easily adaptable to every other. Those
who say that children must be accustomed to the foods they will use when grown do
not reason well, it seems to me. Why should their nourishment be the same while
their way of life is so different? A man exhausted by work, cares, and sorrows
needs succulent foods which carry new spirits to the brain. A child who has just
frolicked, and whose body is growing, needs abundant nourishment which will produce
a lot of chyle for him. Moreover, the
* See the Arcadia of Pausanias;71 see also the passage from Plutarch transcribed
hereafter.
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EMILE
mature man already has his station, his work, and his domicile. But who can be sure
what fortune reserves for the child? In everything let us not give him a form so
determined that it costs him too much to change it in case of need. Let us not make
it so that he will die of hunger in other countries if he is not everywhere
attended by a French cook, or that he will say one day that only in France do they
know how to eat. That is, parenthetically, amusing praise! As for me, on the
contrary, I would say it is only the French who do not know how to eat, since so
special an art is required to make dishes edible for them.
Of our various sensations taste provides those which generally affect us most. Thus
we are interested more in having good judgment about substances which are going to
be a part of our own substance than we are about those which are only around it.
Countless things are indifferent to touch, to hearing, to sight. But there is
almost nothing indifferent to taste. What is more, the activity of this sense is
entirely physical and material; it is the only one which says nothing to the
imagination, or at least it is the one into whose sensations the imagination enters
least, whereas imitation and imagination often mix something moral with the
impression of all the others. Thus, tender and voluptuous hearts, passionate and
truly sensitive characters, easily moved by the other senses, are generally
lukewarm about this one. From this very fact, which seems to put taste beneath them
and to make more contemptible the inclination that delivers us to it, I would
conclude, on the contrary, that the most suitable means for governing children is
to lead them by their mouths. The motive of gluttony is in particular preferable to
that of vanity, in that the former is an appetite of nature, immediately dependent
on sense, while the latter is a work of opinion subject to the caprice of men and
to all sorts of abuses. Gluttony is the passion of childhood. This passion does not
hold out in the face of any other. At the least competition, it disappears. Oh,
believe me! The child will only too soon stop thinking about what he eats, and when
his heart is too occupied, his palate will hardly occupy him. When he is grown,
countless impetuous sentiments will sidetrack gluttony and will only inflame
vanity, for this latter passion alone profits from the others and in the end
swallows them all up. I have sometimes examined these people who gave importance to
delicacies, who thought on awaking of what they would eat during the day, and
described a meal with more exactness than Polybius puts into the description of a
battle. I found that all these pretended men were only forty-year-old children
without vigor or solidity. Fruges consumere nati.72 Gluttony is the vice of hearts
that have no substance. A glutton's soul is all in his palate; it is made only for
eating. In his stupid incapacity he is only at home at the table. He only knows how
to judge dishes. Let us leave him this employment without regret. It is better—as
much for us as for him—that he have this one than another.
To fear that gluttony will take root in a child capable of something is a small-
minded concern. In childhood one thinks only about what one eats. In adolescence
one thinks about it no more. Anything is good for us, and we have much other
business. I would not, however, want us to go and make indiscriminate use of so low
an incentive or bolster
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BOOK II
the honor of doing a fair deed with a delicacy. But since all of childhood is or
ought to be only games and frolicsome play, I do not see why there should not be
for purely corporeal exercises a prize which is material and speaks only to the
senses. When a little Majorcan, seeing a basket on top of a tree, knocks it down
with a slingshot, is it not entirely just that he get the profit from it, and that
a good lunch make up for the strength he used in getting it? * When a young
Spartan, at the risk of a hundred lashes of the whip, slips skillfully into a
kitchen, steals a live fox cub, and, in carrying it under his robe, is scratched by
it, bitten, made bloody; when, so as not to be shamed by being found out, the child
lets his entrails be torn up without frowning, without letting out a single cry, is
it not just that finally he profit from his prey and eat it after having been eaten
by it? A good meal ought never to be a reward, but why should it not be the result
of the care taken in getting it for oneself? Emile does not regard the cake I put
on the stone as the prize for having run well. He knows only that the sole means of
having this cake is to get there sooner than somebody else.
This does not contradict the maxims I advanced just now on the simplicity of food;
for, to gratify children's appetites, there is no need to arouse their sensuality
but only a need to satisfy it. And that can be done by the most common things in
the world, if one does not work at refining children's tastes. Their constant
appetite, aroused by the need to grow, is a reliable seasoning which takes the
place for them of many others. Fruits, dairy products, some baked thing a bit more
delicate than ordinary bread, and, above all, the art of dispensing it all soberly
—with these, armies of children can be led to the ends of the earth without being
given the taste for vivid flavors and without their palates becoming blase.
One of the proofs that the taste for meat is not natural to man is the indifference
that children have for that kind of food and the preference they all give to
vegetable foods, such as dairy products, pastry, fruits, etc. It is, above all,
important not to denature this primitive taste and make children carnivorous. If
this is not for their health, it is for their character; for, however one explains
the experience, it is certain that great eaters of meat are in general more cruel
and ferocious than other men. This is observed in all places and all times. English
barbarism is known; f the Zoroastrians, on the contrary, are the gentlest of men.]:
All savages are cruel, and it is not their morals which cause them to be so. This
cruelty comes from their food. They go to war as to the hunt and treat men like
bears. Even in England butchers are not accepted as witnesses, and neither are
surgeons.74 Great villains harden themselves to murder by drinking blood. Homer
makes the Cyclopes, eaters of human flesh, horrible, while he makes the lotus-
eaters a peo-
* The Majorcans lost this practice many years ago. It belongs to the time when
their slingers were famous.
t I know that the English greatly vaunt their humanity and the good nature of their
nation; they call themselves "good-natured people"; but however much they may shout
that, no one repeats it after them.
t The Banians who abstain from all meat more strictly than the Gaures are almost as
gentle as the Gaures are; but since their morality is less pure and their religion
less reasonable, they are not so decent.™
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EMILE
pie so lovable that, as soon as one had any dealings with them, one even forgot
one's own country to live with them.7"'
You ask me why [said Plutarch] Pythagoras abstained from eating the flesh of
animals? But I ask you, on the contrary, was it a courage appropriate to men that
possessed the first one who brought his mouth to wounded flesh, who used his teeth
to break the bones of an expiring animal, who had dead bodies—cadavers—served to
him, and swallowed up in his stomach parts which a moment before bleated, lowed,
walked, and saw? How could his hand have plunged a knife into the heart of a
feeling being? How could his eyes have endured a murder? How could he see a poor,
defenseless animal bled, skinned, and dismembered? How could he endure the sight of
quivering flesh? How did the smell not make him sick to his stomach? How was he not
disgusted, repulsed, horrified, when he went to handle the excrement from these
wounds, to clean the blood, black and congealed, which covered them?
The skins, stripped off, crawled on the earth; The flesh, on the spit, lowed in the
fire; Man could not eat them without a shudder; And in his breast heard them
moan.70
This is what he must have imagined and felt the first time that he overcame nature
to make this horrible meal, the first time that he was hungry for a living animal,
that he wanted to feed on an animal which was still grazing, and that he said how
the ewe who licked his hands was to be slaughtered, cut up, and cooked. It is by
those who began these cruel feasts, and not by those who gave them up, that one
ought to be surprised. And yet these first men could justify their barbarism with
excuses which we lack and whose absence makes us a hundred times more barbarous
than they.
"Mortals, well-loved of the Gods," these first men would say to us, "compare the
times. See how happy you are and how miserable we were. The earth, newly formed,
and the air, laden with vapors, were not yet willing to submit to the order of the
seasons. The uncertain course of rivers caused them constantly to overflow their
banks; pools, lakes, and deep marshes inundated three-quarters of the earth's
surface. The other quarter was covered with sterile woods and forests. The earth
produced no good fruits. We had no plowing instruments; we were ignorant of the art
of using them; and harvest time never came for him who had sowed nothing. Thus
hunger never left us. In winter, moss and the bark of trees were our ordinary
dishes. Some green roots of couch grass and heather were a banquet for us; and when
men were able to find beechnuts, walnuts, or acorns, they danced for joy around a
chestnut or a beech to the sound of some rustic song, calling the earth their nurse
and mother. This was their only festival; these their only games. All the rest of
human life was only pain, effort, and want.
"Finally when the earth, stripped and naked, had nothing more to
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BOOK II
offer us, we were forced to violate nature to preserve ourselves and ate the
companions of our want rather than perish with them. But you, cruel men, who forces
you to shed blood? See what an abundance of goods surrounds you! How many fruits
the earth produces for you! What riches the fields and the vines give you! How many
animals offer you their milk for your nourishment and their fleece for your
clothing! What more do you ask of them; what rage brings you, sated with goods and
overflowing with victuals, to commit so many murders? Why do you lie about our
mother by accusing her of not being able to feed you? Why do you sin against Ceres,
in-ventress of the holy laws, and against gracious Bacchus, consoler of men, as if
their prodigal gifts were not sufficient for the preservation of humankind? How do
you have the heart to mix bones with their sweet fruits on your tables and to drink
along with milk the blood of the animals who give it to you? The panthers and the
lions that you call ferocious animals follow their instinct perforce and kill other
animals to live. But you, a hundred times more ferocious than they, you combat
instinct without necessity in order to abandon yourselves to your cruel delights.
The animals you eat are not those which eat others. You do not eat these
carnivorous beasts; you imitate them. You are hungry only for innocent and gentle
animals who do no harm to anyone, who become attached to you, who serve you, and
whom you devour as a reward for their services.
"O murderer against nature, if you insist on maintaining that nature made you to
devour your kind, beings of flesh and bone, feeling and living like you, then
smother the horror of these frightful meals it inspires in you. Kill the animals
yourself—I mean with your own hands, without iron tools, without knives. Tear them
apart with your nails, as do lions and bears. Bite this cow and rip him to pieces;
plunge your claws in its skin. Eat this lamb alive; devour its still warm flesh;
drink its soul with its blood. You shudder? You do not dare to feel living flesh
palpitating in your teeth? Pitiful man! You begin by killing the animal; and then
you eat it, as if to make it die twice. This is not enough. The dead flesh is still
repugnant to you; your entrails cannot take it. It has to be transformed by fire,
to be boiled or roasted, and to be seasoned with drugs disguising it. You have to
have butchers, cooks, and roasters, people to take away the horror of the murder
and dress up dead bodies so that the sense of taste, fooled by these disguises,
does not reject what is alien to it and savors with pleasure cadavers whose sight
even the eye would have difficulty bearing!" 77
Although this passage is foreign to my subject, I was not able to resist the
temptation to transcribe it; and I believe that few readers will be annoyed with me
for it.
In any event, whatever diet you give to children—provided that you accustom them
only to common and simple dishes—let them eat, run, and play as much as they
please, and be sure that they will never eat too much and will have no indigestion.
But if you starve them half the time, and they find the means of escaping your
vigilance, they will
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compensate themselves with all their might, they will eat to the point of
overflowing, of exploding. Our appetite is immoderate only because we want to give
it other rules than those of nature. Always regulating, prescribing, adding,
subtracting, we do nothing without weighing it on a scale. But this scale measures
our whims and not our stomachs. I always go back to my examples. In peasants' homes
the bread and fruit bins are always open, and the children as well as the men there
do not know what indigestion is.
If it came to pass, nevertheless, that a child ate too much (which I do not believe
possible by my method), it is so easy to distract him with entertainments to his
taste that one might succeed in exhausting him from starvation without his thinking
about it. How do means so sure and easy escape all teachers? Herodotus tells how
the Lydians, hard pressed by an extreme famine, got the idea of inventing games and
other diversions with which they deceived their hunger and spent entire days
without thinking of eating.* 78 Your learned teachers have perhaps read this
passage a hundred times without seeing how it can be applied to children. Someone
among them will perhaps tell me that a child does not willingly leave his dinner to
go and study his lessons. Master, you are right. I was not thinking of that kind of
entertainment.
The sense of smell is to taste what sight is to touch. It anticipates taste and
informs it about how this or that substance is going to affect it and disposes one
to seek it or flee it according to the impression that one has received of it in
advance. I have heard that savages have a sense of smell which is affected quite
otherwise than ours and judge good and bad smells quite differently. As for me, I
can certainly believe it. Smells by themselves are weak sensations. They move the
imagination more than the sense and affect us not so much by fulfillment as by
expectation. On this assumption the tastes of some, having become so different from
the tastes of others due to their ways of life, must cause them to make contrary
judgments about tastes and consequently about the smells which announce them. A
Tartar must catch the scent of a stinking quarter of a dead horse with as much
pleasure as one of our hunters catches the scent of a half-rotten partridge.
Men who walk too much to like strolling and who do not work enough to make a
voluptuous experience out of rest ought to be insensitive to our idle sensations,
such as enjoying the odor of garden flowers. People who are always famished would
not know how to get great pleasure from fragrances which announce nothing to eat.
Smell is the sense of imagination. Keying up the nerves, it must agitate the brain
a good deal. This is why it revives the temperament for a moment and exhausts it in
the long run. Its effects are known well enough in love. The sweet fragrance of a
dressing room is not so weak a trap as is thought; and I know not whether one ought
to congratulate
* The ancient historians are filled with views which one could use even if the
facts which present them were false. But we do not know how to get any true
advantage from history. Critical erudition absorbs everything, as if it were very
important whether a fact is true, provided that a useful teaching can be drawn from
it. Sensible men ought to regard history as a tissue of fables whose moral is very
appropriate to the human heart.
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or pity that prudent and insensitive man who has never been made to quiver by the
smell of the flowers on his beloved's bosom.
Smell must not be very active in the first age, when imagination, as yet animated
by few passions, is hardly susceptible to emotion, and when we do not have enough
experience to foresee with one sense what is promised to it by another sense.
Indeed, this conclusion is perfectly confirmed by observation; and it is certain
that the sense of smell is still obtuse and almost numb in most children. Not that
the sensation is not as sharp in them as in men—and perhaps more so—but because,
not joining to it any other idea, they are not easily affected by a sentiment of
pleasure or pain in connection with it and are neither charmed nor offended by it
as we are. I believe that without going beyond the same method and without having
recourse to the comparative anatomy of the two sexes, it would be easy to find the
reason why women in general are more intensely affected by smells than men.
It is said that Canadian savages, from their youth on, make their sense of smell so
subtle that, although they have dogs, they do not deign to use them in the hunt and
act as their own dogs. I can indeed conceive that, if children were raised to catch
wind of their dinner as a dog catches wind of game, one could perhaps succeed in
perfecting their sense of smell to the same degree. But, at bottom, I do not see
that it is possible to gain anything very useful for them from the exercise of this
sense, unless it is by making known to them its relations with the sense of taste.
Nature has taken care to force us to become well acquainted with these relations.
It has made the action of the sense of taste almost inseparable from that of the
sense of smell by making their organs adjacent and placing in the mouth an
immediate communication between the two, so that we taste nothing without smelling
it. I would only want that these natural relations not be changed—for example, that
a child be deceived by covering the bitterness of a medicine with a pleasant aroma,
for the discord between the two senses is then too great to be able to fool him.
The more active sense absorbs the effect of the other one, and he does not take the
medicine with less distaste. This distaste is extended to all the sensations which
strike him at the same time. In the presence of the weaker one his imagination also
recalls the other to him. A very sweet fragrance is now to him only a disgusting
smell; and it is thus that our indiscriminate precautions increase the sum of
unpleasant sensations at the expense of pleasant ones.
It remains for me to speak in the following books of the cultivation of a sort of
sixth sense called common sense, less because it is common to all men than because
it results from the well-regulated use of the other senses, and because it
instructs us about the nature of things by the conjunction of all their
appearances. This sixth sense has consequently no special organ. It resides only in
the brain, and its sensations, purely internal, are called perceptions or ideas. It
is by the number of these ideas that the extent of our knowledge is measured. It is
their distinctness, their clarity which constitutes the accuracy of the mind. It is
the art of comparing them among themselves that is called
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human reason. Thus what I would call sensual or childish reason consists in forming
simple ideas by the conjunction of several sensations, and what I call intellectual
or human reason consists in forming complex ideas by the conjunction of several
simple ideas.
Supposing, then, that my method is that of nature, and that I did not make mistakes
in its application, we have led our pupil through the land of sensations up to the
boundaries of childish reason. The first step we are going to make beyond these
boundaries has to be a man's step. But before entering upon this new career, let us
for a moment cast our eyes back over the one we have just completed. Each age, each
condition of life, has its suitable perfection, a sort of maturity proper to it. We
have often heard of a mature man, but let us consider a mature child. This
spectacle will be newer for us and will perhaps be no less pleasant.
The existence of finite beings is so poor and so limited that when we see only what
is, we are never moved. Chimeras adorn real objects; and if imagination does not
add a charm to what strikes us, the sterile pleasure one takes in it is limited to
the perceiving organ and always leaves the heart cold. The earth adorned with
autumn's treasures displays a richness that the eye admires; but this admiration is
not touching; it comes more from reflection than from sentiment. In spring the
countryside, almost naked, is not yet covered with anything, the trees provide no
shade, the green is only beginning to peep out, and the heart is touched by its
aspect. In seeing nature thus reborn, one feels revived oneself. The image of
pleasure surrounds us. Those companions of voluptousness, those sweet tears always
ready to join with every delicious sentiment, are already on the edge of our
eyelids. But though the aspect of the grape harvests may very well be animated,
lively, pleasant, one always sees it with a dry eye.
Why this difference? It is that imagination joins to the spectacle of spring that
of the seasons which are going to follow it. To these tender buds that the eye
perceives imagination adds the flowers, the fruits, the shadows, and sometimes the
mysteries they can cover. It concentrates in a single moment the times which are
going to follow one another, and sees objects less as they will be than as it
desires them because it is free to choose them. In autumn, on the contrary, one can
only see what is. If one wants to get to spring, winter stops us, and imagination,
frozen, expires on the snow and frost.
Such is the source of the charm one finds in contemplating a fair childhood in
preference to the perfection of a ripe age. When is it that we taste a true
pleasure in seeing a man? It is when the memory of his actions causes us to go back
over his life and rejuvenates him, so to speak, in our eyes. If we are reduced to
considering him as he is or to supposing what he will be in his old age, the idea
of nature declining effaces all our pleasure. There is none in seeing a man advance
with great steps toward his grave, and the image of death makes everything ugly.
But when I represent to myself a child between ten and twelve, vigorous and well
formed for his age, he does not cause the birth of a single idea in me which is not
pleasant either for the present or for
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the future. I see him bubbling, lively, animated, without gnawing cares, without
long and painful foresight, whole in his present being, and enjoying a fullness of
life which seems to want to extend itself beyond him. I foresee him at another age
exercising the senses, the mind, and the strength which is developing in him day by
day, new signs of which he gives every moment. I contemplate the child, and he
pleases me. I imagine him as a man, and he pleases me more. His ardent blood seems
to reheat mine. I believe I am living his life, and his vivacity rejuvenates me.
The hour sounds. What a change! Instantly his eyes cloud over; his gaiety is
effaced. Goodbye, joy! Goodbye, frolicsome games! A severe and angry man takes him
by the hand, says to him gravely, "Let us go, sir," and takes him away. In the room
into which they go I catch a glimpse of books. Books! What sad furnishings for his
age! The poor child lets himself be pulled along, turns a regretful eye on all that
surrounds him, becomes silent, and leaves, his eyes swollen with tears he does not
dare to shed, and his heart great with sighs he does not dare to breathe.
O you who have nothing of the kind to fear; you for whom no time of life is a time
of constraint and of boredom; you who see the day come without disquiet, the night
without impatience, and count the hours only by your pleasures—come my happy, my
lovable pupil, console us by your presence for the departure of that unfortunate
boy, come ... He comes, and I feel at his approach a movement of joy which I see
him share. It is his friend, his comrade, it is the companion of his games whom he
approaches. He is quite sure on seeing me that he will not for long remain without
entertainment. We never depend on one another, but we always agree, and with no one
else are we so well off as we are together.
His figure, his bearing, his countenance proclaim assurance and contentment; health
shines from his face; his firm steps give him an air of vigor; his complexion,
still delicate without being washed out, has no effeminate softness; the air and
the sun have already put on it the honorable imprint of his sex; his muscles, still
rounded, begin to show some signs of their nascent features; his eyes, which are
not yet animated by the fire of sentiment, at least have all their native *
serenity; long sorrows have not darkened them; unending tears have not lined his
cheeks. See in his movements, quick but sure, the vivacity of his age, the firmness
of independence, and the experience of much exercise. His aspect is open and free
but not insolent or vain. His face, which has not been glued to books, does not
fall toward his stomach; there is no need to say to him, "Lift your head." Neither
shame nor fear ever caused him to lower it.
Let us make him a place in the midst of the assemblage. Gentlemen, examine him,
interrogate him confidently. Do not fear his importunities, or his chatter, or his
indiscreet questions. Have no fear that he take you over, that he claim all your
attention for himself alone, and that you will not be able to get rid of him.
* Natia. I use this word in an Italian sense for want of finding a synonym for it
in French. If I am wrong, it is unimportant, provided I am understood.™
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Do not expect, either, agreeable remarks from him or that he tell you what I have
dictated to him. Expect only the naive and simple truth, unadorned, unaffected,
without vanity. He will tell you the bad thing he has done or thinks just as freely
as the good, without worrying in any way about the effect on you of what he has
said. He will use speech with all the simplicity present in its first founding.
One likes to augur well of children; and one always regrets that stream of
ineptitudes that almost always comes to overturn the hopes one would like to found
on some lucky observation which falls by chance into their mouths. If my pupil
rarely gives such hopes, he will never give this regret, for he never says a
useless word and does not exhaust himself with a chatter to which he knows no one
listens. His ideas are limited but distinct. If he knows nothing by heart, he knows
much by experience. If he reads less well in our books than does another child, he
reads better in the book of nature. His mind is not in his tongue but in his head.
He has less memory than judgment. He knows how to speak only one language, but he
understands what he says; and if what he says he does not say so well as others, to
compensate for that, what he does, he does better than they do.
He does not know what routine, custom, or habit is. What he did yesterday does not
influence what he does today.* He never follows a formula, does not give way before
authority or example, and acts and speaks only as it suits him. So do not expect
from him dictated speeches or studied manners, but always the faithful expression
of his ideas and the conduct born of his inclinations.
You find in him a small number of moral notions which relate to his present
condition, none concerning men's relative condition. Of what use would these latter
be to him, since a child is not yet an active member of society? Speak to him of
freedom, of property, even of convention: he can know something up to that point.
He knows why what is his is his and why what is not his is not his. Beyond this he
knows nothing. Speak to him of duty, of obedience: he does not know what you mean.
Give him some command: he will not understand you. But tell him, "If you do me such
and such a favor, I will return it when the occasion arises," and he will
immediately be eager to gratify you, for he asks for nothing better than to extend
his domain and to acquire rights over you that he knows to be inviolable. Perhaps
he even finds it not disagreeable to have a position, to be a part, to count for
something. But if this last is his motive, he has already left nature, and you have
not closed tightly all the gates of vanity ahead of time.
On his side, if he needs some assistance, he will ask for it from the first person
he meets without distinction. He would ask for it from the king as from his lackey.
All men are still equal in his eyes. You see by
* The appeal of habit comes from the laziness natural to man, and that laziness
increases in abandoning onself to habit. One does more easily what one has already
done; the trail once blazed becomes easier to follow. Thus it is to be observed
that the empire of habit is very great over the aged and the indolent, very small
over the young and the lively. This way of life is good only for weak souls and
weakens them more from day to day. The only habit useful to children is to subject
themselves without difficulty to the necessity of things, and the only habit useful
to men is to subject themselves without dimculy to reason. Every other habit is a
vice.
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BOOK II
the way in which he makes a request that he is aware that he is owed nothing. He
knows that what he asks is a favor; he also knows that humanity inclines toward
according it. His expressions are simple and laconic. His voice, his look, and his
gesture are those of a being accustomed equally to compliance and refusal. This is
neither the crawling and servile submission of a slave nor the imperious accent of
a master. It is a modest confidence in his fellow man; it is the noble and touching
gentleness of a free but sensitive and weak being who implores the assistance of a
being who is free but strong and beneficent. If you grant him what he asks of you,
he will not thank you, but he will feel that he has contracted a debt. If you
refuse it to him, he will not complain; he will not insist. He knows that would be
useless. He will not say to himself, "I have been refused," but he will say, "It
was impossible." And as I have already said, one hardly rebels against well-
recognized necessity.
Leave him alone at liberty. Watch him act without saying anything to him. Consider
what he will do and how he will go about it. Having no need to prove to himself
that he is free, he never does anything from giddiness and solely to perform an act
of power over himself. Does he not know that he is always master of himself? He is
alert, light, quick, and his movements have all the vivacity of his age, but you do
not see one of them which does not have an end. Whatever he wants to do, he will
never undertake anything beyond his strength, for he has tested it well and knows
it. His means are always appropriate to his designs, and rarely will he act without
being assured of success. He will have an attentive and judicious eye. He will not
stupidly question others about everything he sees, but he will examine it himself
and will tire himself out to discover what he wants to learn before asking. If he
gets in unforeseen difficulties, he will be less disturbed than another; if there
is risk, he will also be less frightened. Since his imagination still remains
inactive, and nothing has been done to animate it, he sees only what is, estimates
dangers only at what they are worth, and always keeps his composure. Necessity
weighs heavy on him too often for him still to baulk at it. He bears its yoke from
his birth. Now he is well accustomed to it. He is always ready for anything.
Whether he is busy or playing, it is all the same to him. His games are his
business, and he is aware of no difference. He brings to what- "~ ever he does an
interest which makes people laugh and a freedom which pleases them, thereby showing
at once the turn of his mind and^. the sphere of his knowledge. Is this not the
spectacle appropriate to this age, the charming and sweet spectacle of seeing a
pretty child with an eye that is lively and gay, a manner contented and serene, a
face open and laughing, doing the most serious things at play or profoundly busy
with the most frivolous entertainments?
Do you now want to judge him by comparisons? Let him mix with other children and do
as he pleases. You will soon see which is the most truly formed, which best
approaches the perfection of his age. Among the city children none is more adroit
than he, but he is stronger than any other. Among young peasants he is their equal
in strength and surpasses them in skill. Concerning all that is within the reach of
child-
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hood he judges, reasons, and foresees better than all of them. Is there a matter
involving action, running, jumping, moving bodies, lifting masses, estimating
distances, inventing games, winning prizes? One would say nature is at his command,
so easily does he know how to bend everything to his will. He is made for guiding,
for governing his equals. Talent and experience take the place for him of right and
authority. Clothe and name him as you please. It is not important. Everywhere he
will be first, everywhere he will become the chief of the others. They will always
sense his superiority over them. Without wanting to command, he will be the master;
without believing they are obeying, they will obey.
He has come to the maturity of childhood. He has lived a child's life. He has not
purchased his perfection at the expense of his happiness; on the contrary, they
have cooperated with each other. In acquiring all the reason belonging to his age,
he has been happy and free to the extent his constitution permits him. If the fatal
scythe comes to harvest the flower of our hopes in him, we shall not have to lament
his life and his death at the same time. We shall not embitter our sorrows with the
memory of those we caused him. We shall say to ourselves, "At least he enjoyed his
childhood. We did not make him lose anything that nature had given him."
The great difficulty with this first education is that it is perceptible only to
clear-sighted men and that in a child raised with so much care, vulgar eyes see
only a little rascal. A preceptor thinks of his own interest more than of his
disciple's. He is devoted to proving that he is not wasting his time and that he is
earning the money he is paid. He provides the child with some easily displayed
attainments that can be showed off when wanted. It is not important whether what he
teaches the child is useful, provided that it is easily seen. He accumulates,
without distinction or discernment, a rubbish heap in the child's memory. When the
child is to be examined, he is made to spread out his merchandise. He displays it;
satisfaction is obtained. Then he closes up his pack again and leaves. My pupil is
not so rich. He has no pack to spread out. He has nothing to show other than
himself. Now, a child, no more than a man, is not to be seen in a moment. Where are
the observers who know how to grasp at first glance the traits which characterize
him? Such observers exist, but they are few; and in a hundred thousand fathers not
one of them will be found.
Too many questions bore and repulse everyone, and children even more so. At the end
of a few minutes their attention wanders; they no longer listen to what an
obstinate questioner asks them and respond only at random. This way of examining
them is vain and pedantic; often a word caught in midflight depicts their bent and
their mind better than a long speech would. But care must be taken that this word
is neither dictated nor fortuitous. One must have a great deal of judgment oneself
to appreciate a child's.
I heard the late Lord Hyde tell the story of one of his friends who, returning from
Italy after three-years absence, wanted to examine his nine- or ten-year-old son's
progress. They went for a walk one evening with the boy and his governor in a field
where schoolboys were playing
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BOOK II
at flying kites. The father asked his son, in passing, "Where is the kite whose
shadow is here?" Without hesitation, without lifting his head, the child said,
"Over the highway." "And, indeed," added Lord Hyde, "the highway was between us and
the sun." The father at this response kissed his son and, leaving his examination
at that, went away without saying anything. The next day he sent the governor the
title to a lifetime pension in addition to his salary.
What a man that father was, and what a son was promised him! The question suits his
age precisely; the response is quite simple. But see what it implies about the
incisiveness of the child's judgment! It is thus that Aristotle's pupil tamed that
famous steed which no horseman had been able to break.80
End of the Second Book

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BOOK III
A
.A. _m-LTHOUGH the whole course of life up to adolescence is a time of weakness,
there is a point during this first age when the growth of strength has passed that
of need, and the growing animal, still weak absolutely, becomes strong relatively.
His needs are not all developed, and his present strength is more than sufficient
to provide for those he has. As a man he would be very weak; as a child he is very
strong.
From where does man's weakness come? From the inequality between his strength and
his desires. It is our passions that make us weak, because to satisfy them we would
need more strength than nature gives us. Therefore, diminish desires, and you will
increase strength. He who is capable of more than he desires has strength left
over; he is certainly a very strong being. This is the third stage of childhood,
and the one about which I now must speak. I continue to call it childhood for want
of a term to express it, for this age approaches adolescence without yet being that
of puberty.
At twelve or thirteen the child's strength develops far more rapidly than his
needs. The most violent, the most terrible of these needs has not yet made itself
felt in him. Its very organ remains in a state of imperfection and, in order to
emerge from it, seems to wait only for his will to force it to do so. The child is
hardly sensitive to injury from the air and the seasons, and his nascent heat takes
the place of clothing. His appetite takes the place of seasoning; all that can
nourish is good at his age. If he is tired, he stretches out on the earth and
sleeps. He sees himself everywhere surrounded by all that is necessary to him. No
imaginary need torments him. Opinions can have no effect on him. His desires go no
farther than his arms. Not only is he self-sufficient, he has strength beyond what
he needs. It is the only time in his life when this will be the case.
I anticipate the objection. It will not be said that the child has more needs than
I give him, but it will be denied that he has the strength I attribute to him. It
will not be remembered that I am speaking of my pupil rather than of those walking
dolls who travel from one room to another, who plow in a box and bear cardboard
loads. I will be told
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that virile strength is manifested only in virility, that the vital spirits
prepared in the appropriate vessels and spread through the whole body can alone
give to muscles the consistency, the activity, the tone, and the resiliency from
which true strength results. This is armchair philosophy; but I appeal to
experience. I see big boys in your fields plow, hoe, drive a team, load a barrel of
wine, and control a cart just like their fathers. One would take them for men if
the sound of their voices did not betray them. Even in our_cities, young laborers,
ironworkers, toolmakers, and blacksmiths are almost as robust as the masters and
would be hardly less skilled if they had been trained in time. If there is a
difference, and I admit that there is, it is much less, I repeat, than the
difference between a man's impetuous desires and a child's limited desires.
Moreover, the question here is not only one of physical strength but particularly
one of the mental strength and capacity which supplements physical strength or
directs it.
Although this interval during which the individual is capable of more than he
desires is not the time of his greatest absolute strength, it is, as I have said,
the time of his greatest relative strength. It is the most precious time of life, a
time which comes only once, a very short time, one even shorter—as will be seen in
what follows—because of the importance of his using it well.
What will he do, then, with this surplus of faculties and strength, of which he has
too much at present and which he will lack at another age? He will try to use it in
ways which can be of profit to him when needed. He will channel, so to speak, the
overflow of his present being into the future. The robust child will make
provisions for the weak man, but he will not store them in coffers that can be
stolen from him or in barns that are alien to him. In order to appropriate truly
his acquisitions, he will house them in his arms and in his head; he will house
them in himself. This is, therefore, the time of labors, of instruction, of study.
And note that it is not I who arbitrarily make this choice. It is nature itself
that points to it.
Human intelligence has its limits; and not only is it impossible for a man to know
everything, he cannot even know completely the little that other men know. Since
the contradictory of each false proposition is a truth, the number of truths is as
inexhaustible as that of errors. A choice must, therefore, be made of the things
that ought to be taught as well as of the proper time for learning them. Of the
fields of learning that are available to us, some are false, others are useless,
others serve to feed the pride of the man who possesses them. The small number of
those which really contribute to our well-being is alone worthy of the researches
of a wise man and, consequently, of a child whom one wants to make wise. It is a
question not of knowing what is but only of knowing what is useful.
From this small number it is necessary to remove the truths which demand for their
comprehension an understanding already completely formed; those that presuppose a
knowledge of man's relations which a child cannot acquire; those that, although
true in themselves, dispose an inexperienced soul to think falsely about other
subjects.
Thus we are reduced to a very small circle relative to the existence
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of things. But what an immense sphere for the scope of a child's mind this circle
still forms! Darkness of human understanding, what reckless hand dared to touch
your veil? What abysses I see opened up around this young unfortunate by our vain
sciences! O tremble, you, who are going to lead him in these perilous paths and
raise nature's sacred curtain before his eyes. Be sure, in the first place, of his
balance and yours; fear lest one or the other, and perhaps both of you, get dizzy.
Fear the specious attraction of lies and the intoxicating vapors of pride.
Remember, remember constantly that ignorance never did any harm, that error alone
is fatal, and that one is misled not by what he does not know but by what he
believes he knows.
The child's progress in geometry can serve you as a test and a certain measure of
the development of his intelligence. But as soon as he can discern what is useful
and what is not, it is important to use much tact and art to lead him to
speculative studies. Do you, for example, want him to look for a proportional mean
between two lines? Begin by arranging it so that he has to find a square equal to a
given rectangle. If the problem has to do with two proportional means, you would
first have to interest him in the problem of doubling a cube, etc. See how we
gradually approach moral notions which distinguish good and bad! Up to now we have
known no law other than that of necessity. Now we are dealing with what is useful.
We shall soon get to what is suitable and good.
The same instinct animates man's diverse faculties. To the activity of the body
which seeks development succeeds the activity of the mind which seeks instruction.
At first children are only restless; then they are curious; and that curiosity,
well directed, is the motive of the age we have now reached. Let us always
distinguish between the inclinations which come from nature and those which come
from opinion. There is an ardor to know which is founded only on the desire to be
esteemed as learned; there is another ardor which is born of a curiosity natural to
man concerning all that might have a connection, close or distant, with his
interests. The innate desire for well-being and the impossibility of fully
satisfying this desire make him constantly seek for new means of contributing to
it. This is the first principle of curiosity, a principle natural to the human
heart, but one which develops only in proportion to our passions and our
enlightenment. Picture a philosopher relegated to a desert island with instruments
and books, sure of spending the rest of his days there. He will hardly trouble
himself any longer about the system of the world, the laws of attraction,
differential calculus. He will perhaps not open a single book in his life. But
never will he refrain from visiting the last nook and cranny of his island, however
large it may be. Let us, therefore, also reject in our first studies the kinds of
knowledge for which man does not have a natural taste and limit ourselves to those
instinct leads us to seek.
The island of humankind is the earth. The most striking object to our eyes is the
sun. As soon as we begin to get a distance on ourselves, our first observations
must concern them. Thus the philosophy of almost all savage peoples turns solely on
imaginary divisions of the earth and on the divinity of the sun.
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"What a disparity," it will perhaps be said. "A while ago we were concerned only
with what touches us, with what immediately surrounds us. All of a sudden here we
are traveling around the globe and leaping to the ends of the universe!" This
disparity is the effect of the development of our strength and the bent of our
mind. In the state of weakness and insufficiency concern for our preservation
concentrates us within ourselves. In the state of power and strength the desire to
extend our being takes us out of ourselves and causes us to leap as far as is
possible for us. But since the intellectual world is still unknown to us, our
thought does not go farther than our eyes, and our understanding is extended only
along with the space it measures.
Let us transform our sensations into ideas but not leap all of a sudden from
objects of sense to intellectual objects. It is by way of the former that we ought
to get to the latter. In the first operations of the mind let the senses always be
its guides. No book other than the world, no instruction other than the facts. The
child who reads does not think, he only reads; he is not informing himself, he
learns words.
Make your pupil attentive to the phenomena of nature. Soon you will make him
curious. But to feed his curiosity, never hurry to satisfy it. Put the questions
within his reach and leave them to him to resolve. Let him know something not
because you told it to him but because he has understood it himself. Let him not
learn science but discover it. If ever you substitute in his mind authority for
reason, he will no longer reason. He will be nothing more than the plaything of
others' opinion.
You want to teach geography to this child, and you go and get globes, cosmic
spheres, and maps for him. So many devices! Why all these representations? Why do
you not begin by showing him the object itself, so that he will at least know what
you are talking to him about?
One fine evening we go for a walk in a suitable place where a broad, open horizon
permits the setting sun to be fully seen, and we observe the objects which make
recognizable the location of its setting. The next day, to get some fresh air, we
return to the same place before the sun rises. We see it announcing itself from
afar by the fiery arrows it launches ahead of it. The blaze grows; the east appears
to be wholly in flames. By their glow one expects the star for a long time before
it reveals itself. At every instant one believes that he sees it appear. Finally
one sees it. A shining point shoots out like lightning and immediately fills all of
space. The veil of darkness is drawn back and falls. Man recognizes his habitat and
finds it embellished. The verdure has gained a new vigor during the night. The
nascent day which illuminates it, the first rays which gild it, show it covered by
a shining web of dew which reflects the light and the colors to the eye. The birds
in chorus join together in concert to greet the father of life. At that moment not
a single one keeps quiet. Their chirping, still weak, is slower and sweeter than
during the rest of the day; it has the feel of the languor of a peaceful awakening.
The conjunction of these objects brings to the senses an impression of freshness
which seems to penetrate to the soul. There is here a half-hour of enchantment
which no man can resist. So great, so fair, so delicious a spectacle leaves no one
cold.
Full of the enthusiasm he feels, the master wants to communicate
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it to the child. He believes he moves the child by making him attentive to the
sensations by which he, the master, is himself moved. Pure stupidity! It is in
man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists. To see it, one must feel
it. The child perceives the objects, but he cannot perceive the relations linking
them; he cannot hear the sweet harmony of their concord. For that is needed
experience he has not acquired; in order to sense the complex impression that
results all at once from all these sensations, he needs sentiments he has not had.
If he has not long roamed arid plains, if burning sands have not scorched his feet,
if the suffocating reflections of stones struck by the sun have never oppressed
him, how will he enjoy the cool air of a fine morning? How will the fragrances of
the flowers, the charm of the verdure, the humid vapors of the dew, and the soft
and gentle touch of the grass underfoot enchant his senses? How will the song of
the birds cause a voluptuous emotion in him, if the accents of love and pleasure
are still unknown to him? With what transports will he see so fair a day dawning,
if his imagination does not know how to paint for him those transports with which
it can be filled? Finally, how can he be touched by the beauty of nature's
spectacle, if he does not know the hand responsible for adorning it?
Do not make speeches to the child which he cannot understand. No descriptions, no
eloquence, no figures, no poetry. It is not now a question of sentiment or taste.
Continue to be clear, simple, and cold. The time for adopting another kind of
language will come only too soon.
Raised in the spirit of our maxims, accustomed to draw all his instruments out of
himself and never to have recourse to another person before he has himself
recognized his insufficiency, he examines each new object he sees for a long time
without saying anything. He is pensive, and not a questioner. Be satisfied,
therefore, with presenting him with objects opportunely. Then, when you see his
curiosity sufficiently involved, put to him some laconic question which sets him on
the way to answering it.
On this occasion, after having contemplated the rising sun with him, after having
made him notice the mountains and the other neighboring objects in that direction,
after having let him chat about it at his ease, keep quiet for a few moments like a
man who dreams, and then say to him, "I was thinking that yesterday evening the sun
set here and that this morning it rose there. How is that possible?" Add nothing
more. If he asks you questions, do not respond to them. Talk about something else.
Leave him to himself, and be sure that he will think about it.
For a child to get accustomed to being attentive and for him to be strongly
impressed by some truth involving objects of sense, he has to worry over it for a
few days before he discovers it. If he does not conceive of this one adequately in
this way, there is a means of making it even more evident to his senses; and that
means is to turn the question around. If he does not know how the sun gets from its
setting to its rising, he knows at least how it gets from its rising to its
setting. His eyes alone teach him that. Clarify, therefore, the former question by
the latter. Either your pupil is absolutely stupid, or the analogy is too clear to
be able to escape him. This is his first lesson in cosmography.1
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Since we always proceed slowly from one idea based on the senses to another, we
familiarize ourselves with one for a long time before going on to another, and,
finally, we never force our pupil to be attentive; it is a long way from this first
lesson to knowledge of the path of the sun and the shape of the earth. But since
all the apparent movements of the celestial bodies depend on the same principle and
the first observation leads to all the others, less effort, although more time, is
needed to get from a diurnal revolution to the calculation of eclipses than is
needed to understand day and night well.
Since the sun turns around the earth, it describes a circle, and every circle must
have a center. We already know that. This center cannot be seen, for it is at the
heart of the earth. But one can mark on its surface two points which correspond to
it. A spike passing through the three points and lengthened up to the heavens on
both sides will be the axis of the earth and of the sun's daily movement. A round
top turning on its tip represents the heavens turning on their axis; the top's two
tips are the two poles. The child will be delighted to know one of them. I show it
to him on the tail of the Little Bear. This is our entertainment for the night.
Little by little he gains familiarity with the stars, and from there is born the
first taste for knowing the planets and observing the constellations.
We have seen the sun rising on Midsummer Day. We also go to see it rising on
Christmas Day or some other fair winter day, for you know that we are not lazy and
that we make a game of braving the cold. I am careful to make this second
observation in the same place where we made the first; and, provided that some
skill has been used in preparing the observation, one or the other will not fail to
cry out, "Oh, oh! Here is something funny! The sun does not rise anymore in the
same place. Here are our old markers, and now it is rising over there, etc. . . .
there is, then, a summer east and a winter east, etc. . . ." Young master, you are
now on your way. These examples ought to suffice for you to teach the celestial
sphere very clearly while taking the earth as the earth and the sun as the sun.
In general, never substitute the sign for the thing except when it is impossible
for you to show the latter, for the sign absorbs the child's attention and makes
him forget the thing represented.
The armillary sphere - appears to me an ill-conceived device and poorly
proportioned in its execution. This confusion of circles and the bizarre figures
with which they are labeled give it the air of a sorcerer's book which scares off a
child's mind. The earth is too small; the circles are too big and too numerous;
some of them, like the colures,3 are perfectly useless. Each circle is larger than
the earth; the thickness of the cardboard gives them an air of solidity which
causes them to be taken for really existing circular masses; and when you tell the
child these circles are imaginary, he does not know what he sees; he no longer
understands.
We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into
their ideas; we lend them ours, and, always following our own reasonings, with
chains of truths we heap up only follies and errors in their heads.
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There is a dispute about the choice of analysis or synthesis for studying the
sciences. It is not always necessary to choose. Sometimes one can use both
resolution and combination in the same researches and guide the child by the method
of instruction when he believes he is only analyzing. Then if both were used at the
same time, they would serve as reciprocal proofs. Starting at the same time from
the two opposite points, without thinking he is traveling the same road, he would
be quite surprised to meet himself, and this surprise could only be very agreeable.
I would, for example, want to take geography by its two extremes and join to the
study of the globe's revolutions the measurement of its parts, beginning with the
place where one lives. While the child studies the celestial sphere and is thus
transported into the heavens, lead him back to the division of the earth and show
him first his own habitat.4
His two first points of geography will be the city in which he dwells and his
father's country house; then will come the intermediate places, then the
neighboring rivers, and finally the sun's position and the way of orienting oneself
by it. This is the meeting place. Let him make a map of all these thingsr himself,
a very simple map, at first formed by two objects alone, to which he adds the
others little by little to the extent that he knows or estimates their distance and
their position. You see already what an advantage we have procured for him in
putting a compass in his eyes.
In spite of that, he will doubtless have to be guided a little—but very little, and
without its becoming apparent. If he makes a mistake, let him do so; do not correct
his errors. Wait in silence until he is ready to see and correct them himself; or,
at most, on a favorable occasion carry out some operation which will make him aware
of them. If he never made mistakes, he would not learn so well. Moreover, the goal
is not that he know exactly the topography of the region, but that he know the
means of learning about it. It is of little importance that he have maps in his
head, provided that he is able to get a good conception of what they represent, and
that he has a distinct idea of the art which serves to draw them. See the
difference there already is between your pupils' knowledge and mine's ignorance!
They know maps, and he makes them. Here are new ornaments for his room.
Remember always that the spirit of my education consists not in teaching the child
many things, but in never letting anything but accurate and clear ideas enter his
brain. Were he to know nothing, it would be of little importance to me provided he
made no mistakes. I put truths into his head only to guarantee him against the
errors he would learn in their place. Reason and judgment come slowly; prejudices
come in crowds; it is from them that he must be preserved. But if you look at
science in itself, you enter into a bottomless sea, without shores, full of reefs.
You will never get away. When I see a man, enamoured of the various kinds of
knowledge, let himself be seduced by their charm and run from one to the other
without knowing how to stop himself, I believe I am seeing a child on the shore
gathering shells and beginning by loading himself up with them; then, tempted by
those he sees next, he throws some away and picks up others, until, over-
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whelmed by their multitude and not knowing anymore which to choose, he ends by
throwing them all away and returning empty-handed.
During the first age time was long. We sought only to waste it for fear of making
bad use of it. Now it is exactly the opposite, and we do not have enough time to do
everything which would be useful. Reflect that the passions are approaching, and
that as soon as they knock on the door, your pupil will no longer pay attention to
anything but them. The peaceful age of intelligence is so short, it passes so
rapidly, it has so many other necessary uses, that it is folly to wish that it
suffice for making a child learned. The issue is not to teach him the sciences but
to give him the taste for loving them and methods for learning them when this taste
is better developed. This is very certainly a fundamental principle of every good
education.
Now is also the time to accustom him little by little to paying continual attention
to the same object. But this attention ought always to be produced by pleasure or
desire, never by constraint. Great care must be taken that it does not become a
burden to him and get to the point of boredom. Always, therefore, keep on the
lookout and, whatever you do, stop everything before he gets bored, for it is never
as important that he learn as that he do nothing in spite of himself.
If he questions you himself, answer enough to feed his curiosity, but not so much
as to sate it. Above all, when you see that instead of questioning for the sake of
instruction he is beating around the bush and overwhelming you with silly
questions, stop immediately, with the certainty that now he cares no longer about
the thing but about subjecting you to his interrogation. You must pay less
attention to the words he pronounces than to the motive which causes him to speak.
This warning, less necessary before now, becomes of the greatest importance when
the child begins to reason.
There is a chain of general truths by which all the sciences are connected with
common principles out of which they develop successively. This chain is the method
of philosophers. We are not dealing with it here. There is another entirely
different chain by which each particular object attracts another and always shows
the one that follows. This order, which fosters by means of constant curiosity the
attention that they all demand, is the one most men follow and, in particular, is
the one required for children. In orienting ourselves to draw our maps, we had to
draw meridians. Two points of intersection between the equal shadows of morning and
evening provide an excellent meridian for an astronomer of thirteen.5 But these
meridians disappear. Time is needed to draw them. They subject one to working
always in the same place. So much care, so much constraint would end by boring him.
We foresaw it. We provide for it in advance.
Here I am once again in my lengthy and minute details. Reader, I hear your
grumbling, and I brave it. I do not want to sacrifice the most useful part of this
book to your impatience. Make your decision about my delays, for I have made mine
about your complaints.
A long time ago my pupil and I had noticed that amber, glass, wax, and various
other bodies when rubbed attracted straws and that others did not attract them. By
chance we find one which has a still more
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singular virtue, that of attracting at some distance—without being rubbed—shavings
and other bits of iron. How long this quality entertains us without our being able
to see anything more in it! Finally, we find that the iron itself acquires this
quality from the lodestone when drawn across it in any single direction. One day we
go to the fair;(i a magician attracts a wax duck floating in a tub of water with a
piece of bread. Although we are quite surprised, we nevertheless do not say, "He is
a sorcerer," for we do not know what a sorcerer is. Constantly struck by effects
whose causes we do not know, we are in no hurry to make any judgments, and we
remain at rest in our ignorance until we happen to find the occasion to escape it.
After returning home, by dint of talking about the duck at the fair, we get it into
our heads to imitate it. We take a good, well-magnetized needle; we surround it
with white wax that we do our best to shape in the form of a duck, with the needle
going through the body and its point constituting the bill. We put the duck in the
water, we bring the top part of a key close to the bill, and we see with a joy easy
to understand that our duck follows the key exactly as the one at the fair followed
the piece of bread. To observe the direction the duck faces when left at rest in
the water is something we can do another time. As for now, busy with our plan, we
do not want more.
The very same evening we return to the fair with bread ready in our pockets, and as
soon as the magician does his trick, my little doctor, who was hardly able to
contain himself, says to him that this trick is not difficult and that he himself
will do as much. He is taken at his word. Immediately he pulls the bread with the
piece of iron hidden in it from his pocket. On approaching the table, his heart
thumps. Practically quaking, he holds out the bread. The duck comes and follows
him. The child cries out and shivers with delight. At the crowd's clapping and
acclamation he gets dizzy; he is beside himself. The mountebank, confounded, comes
nevertheless and embraces him, congratulates him, and begs the child to honor him
again by his presence the next day, adding that he will make an effort to gather a
still larger crowd to applaud his skill. My proud little naturalist wants to
chatter. But I immediately shut him up and take him away covered with praise.
The child counts the minutes till the next day with a ridiculous excitement. He
invites everyone he meets; he would want the whole of humankind to be witness to
his glory. He hardly can wait for the hour. He is ahead of time; we fly to the
appointment. The hall is already full. On entering, his young heart swells. Other
games are going to be first. The magician surpasses himself and does surprising
things. The child sees nothing of all that. He is agitated; he sweats; he is hardly
able to breathe. He spends his time handling the piece of bread in his pocket with
a hand trembling with impatience. Finally his time comes. The master announces him
to the public with pomp. He comes forward with a bit of shame; he takes out his
bread and . . . new vicissitude of things human! The duck, so responsive the day
before, has turned wild today. Instead of offering its bill, it turns tail and
flees. It avoids the bread and the hand offering it with as much care as it
followed them previously. After countless useless attempts and constantly being
jeered
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at, the child complains, says that he is being deceived, that another duck has been
substituted for the first one; he defies the magician to attract this one.
The magician, without responding, takes a piece of bread and offers it to the duck.
Immediately the duck follows the bread and comes toward the retreating hand. The
child takes the same piece of bread, but far from succeeding better than before, he
sees the duck make fun of him and do pirouettes all around the tub. He finally
steps back in confusion and no longer dares to expose himself to the jeers.
Then the magician takes the piece of bread the child has brought and uses it with
as much success as his own. He pulls the iron out of it in front of everyone.
Another laugh at our expense. Then, with the bread thus emptied, he attracts the
duck as before. He does the same thing with another piece cut in front of everyone
by another's hand. He does the same with his glove, the tip of his finger. Finally
he moves away to the middle of the room and in the emphatic tone peculiar to such
people, declaring that his duck will obey his voice no less than his gesture, he
speaks to it, and the duck obeys. He tells it to go right and it goes right, to
return and it returns, to turn and it turns. The movement is as prompt as the
order. The redoubled applause is that much more of an affront to us. We escape
unnoticed and shut ourselves up in our room without going to recount our successes
to everyone as we had planned.
The next morning there is a knock at our door. I open it, and there is the
magician. Modestly he complains of our conduct. What did he do to us to make us
want to discredit his games and take away his livelihood? What is so wonderful
about the art of attracting a wax duck to make it worth purchasing this honor at
the expense of an honest man's subsistence? "My faith, messieurs, if I had some
other talent by which to live, I would hardly glorify myself with this one. You
should have believed that a man who has spent his life practicing this paltry
trickery knows more about it than do you who have devoted only a few moments to it.
If I did not show you my master strokes right off, it is because one ought not to
be in a hurry to show off giddily what one knows. I am always careful to keep my
best tricks for the proper occasion; and after this one I have still others to stop
tactless young men. Finally, messieurs, I come out of the goodness of my heart to
teach you the secret that perplexed you so. I beg you not to abuse it to my hurt
and to be more restrained the next time."
Then he shows us his device, and we see with the greatest surprise that it consists
only of a strong lodestone, well encased in soft iron, which a child hidden under
the table moved without being noticed.
The man puts his device away, and, after giving him our thanks and apologies, we
wish to make him a present. He refuses it. "No, messieurs, I am not pleased enough
with you to accept your gifts. I leave you obliged to me in spite of yourselves. It
is my only vengeance. Learn that there is generosity in every station. I get paid
for my tricks and not my lessons."
In leaving, he addresses a reprimand to me explicitly and out loud. "I willingly
excuse," he says to me, "this child. He has sinned only from
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ignorance. But you, monsieur, who ought to know his mistake, why did you let him
make it? Since you live together, as the elder you owe him your care and your
counsel; your experience is the authority which ought to guide him. In reproaching
himself for the wrongs of his youth when he is grown up, he will doubtless reproach
you for those, against which you did not warn him."
He departs, leaving us both very embarrassed. I blame myself for my soft
easygoingness. I promise the child to sacrifice it to his interest the next time
and to warn him of his mistakes before he makes them; for the time is approaching
when our relations are going to change, when the master's severity must succeed the
comrade's compliance. This change ought to take place gradually. Everything must be
foreseen, and everything must be foreseen very far ahead of time.
The next day we return to the fair to see again the trick whose secret we have
learned. We approach our magician-Socrates with profound respect. Hardly do we dare
to raise our eyes to him. He covers us with attentions and gives us a place of
distinction, which humiliates us again. He does his tricks as usual, but he
entertains and indulges himself for a long time with the duck trick while looking
often at us with quite a proud air. We know everything, and we do not breathe a
word. If my pupil dared so much as to open his mouth, he would deserve to be
annihilated.
Each detail of this example is more important than it seems. How many lessons in
one! How many mortifying consequences are attracted by the first movement of
vanity! Young master, spy out this first movement with care. If you know thus how
to make humiliation and disgrace arise from it, be sure that a second movement will
not come for a long time. "So much preparation!" you will say. I agree—and all for
the sake of making ourselves a compass to take the place of a meridian.
Having learned that the magnet acts through other bodies, we have nothing more
pressing to do than to make a device like the one we have seen. A table hollowed
out, a very flat tub fitted into the table and filled with a few inches of water, a
duck made with a bit more care, etc. Often busy around the tub, we finally notice
that the duck at rest always points in pretty nearly the same direction. We follow
up this experience; we examine this direction; we find that it is from south to
north. Nothing more is needed; our compass is found, or as good as found. Now we
are into physics.
There are various climates on the earth and various temperatures in these climates.
One feels the variation of the seasons more as one approaches the pole. All bodies
contract with cold and expand with heat. This effect is more measurable in liquids
and more accessible to the senses in spirituous liquids: hence the thermometer.
Wind strikes the face; air is, therefore, a body, a fluid; one feels it although
one has no means of seeing it. Turn a glass upside down in water; the water will
not fill it unless you allow the air a way out; air is, therefore, capable of
resistance. Push the glass farther down; the water will make headway in the
airspace without being able to fill that space completely; air is, therefore,
capable of compression up to a certain point. A ball filled with compressed air
bounces better than any other matter; air is, there-
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fore, an elastic body. When you are stretched out in the bath, lift your arm
horizontally out of the water; you will feel that it is loaded with a terrible
weight; air is, therefore, a heavy body. By putting air in equilibrium with other
fluids, its weight can be measured; this is the source of the barometer, the
siphon, the air gun, and the pneumatic pump. All the laws of statics and
hydrostatics are to be found by experiments just as crude. I do not want to go into
an experimental physics laboratory for any of this. This whole apparatus of
instruments and machines displeases me. The scientific atmosphere kills science.
Either all these machines frighten a child, or their appearance divides and steals
the attention he ought to pay to their effects.
I want us to make all our machines ourselves, and I do not want to begin by making
the instrument prior to the experiment. But I do want us, after having caught a
glimpse, as it were by chance, of the experiment to be performed, to invent little
by little the instrument for verification. I prefer that our instruments be less
perfect and accurate and that we have more distinct ideas about what they ought to
be and the operations which ought to result from them. For my first lesson in
statics, instead of going to look for scales, I put a stick across the back of a
chair, and I measure the length of the two parts of the stick in balance. I add
weights to both sides, sometimes equal, sometimes unequal, and, pushing and pulling
as much as is necessary, I finally find that balance is the result of a reciprocal
proportion between the quantity of the weights and the length of the levers. Now my
little physicist is already capable of rectifying scales before seeing one.
Without question, one gets far clearer and far surer notions of the things one
learns in this way by oneself than of those one gets from another's teachings.
One's reason does not get accustomed to a servile submission to authority;
furthermore, we make ourselves more ingenious at finding relations, connecting
ideas, and inventing instruments than we do when, accepting all of these things as
they are given to us, we let our minds slump into indifference—like the body of a
man who, always clothed, shod, and waited on by his servants and drawn by his
horses, finally loses the strength and use of his limbs. Boileau boasted of having
taught Racine to have difficulty in rhyming. Among so many admirable methods for
abridging the study of the sciences we greatly need someone to provide us with a
method for learning them with effort.
The most palpable advantage of these slow and laborious researches is that they
keep the body active and the limbs supple during speculative studies and
continuously form the hands for the work and the practices useful to man. All the
instruments invented to guide us in our experiments and to take the place of
accuracy of the senses cause the senses to be neglected. The graphometer frees us
from having to estimate the size of angles. The eye, which used to measure
distances with precision, relies on the chain which measures them for it. The
balance frees me from judging by hand the weight I know by means of the balance.
The more ingenious are our tools, the cruder and more maladroit our organs become.
By dint of gathering machines around us, we no longer find any in ourselves.
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But when we put the skill which used to take the place of these machines into
manufacturing them, when we use the sagacity which was required to do without them
for making them, we gain without losing anything, we add art to nature, and we
become more ingenious without becoming less adroit. If, instead of glueing a child
to books, I bury him in a workshop, his hands work for the profit of his mind; he
becomes a philosopher arid believes he is only a laborer. Finally, this exercise
has other uses of which I shall speak hereafter, and it will be seen how from the
games of philosophy one can rise to the true functions of man.
I have already said that purely speculative knowledge is hardly suitable for
children, even those nearing adolescence. But without making them go very far in
systematic physics, nonetheless arrange that all their experiments are connected
with one another by some sort of deduction, in order that with the aid of this
chain they can order them in their minds and recall them when needed; for it is
quite difficult for isolated facts and even reasonings to stick in the memory if
one lacks some connection by which to recall them.
In the quest for the laws of nature, always begin with the phenomena most common
and most accessible to the senses, and accustom your pupil to take these phenomena
not for reasons but for facts. I take a stone and feign placing it in the air. I
open my hand; the stone falls. I look at Emile, who is attentive to what I am
doing, and I say to him, "Why did this stone fall?"
What child will stop short at this question? None, not even Emile, if I have not
made a great effort to prepare him not to know how to respond. All will say that
the stone falls because it is heavy. And what is heavy? That is what falls. The
stone falls, therefore, because it falls? Here my little philosopher is really
stumped. This is his first lesson in systematic physics, and, whether it profits
him in this study or not, it will still be a lesson in good sense.
To the extent that the child advances in intelligence, other important
considerations oblige us to be more selective in his occupations. As soon as he
gets to know himself sufficiently to conceive in what his well-being consists; as
soon as he can grasp relations comprehensive enough to enable him to judge what
suits him and what does not suit him; from then on he is in a condition to sense
the difference between work and play and to regard the latter as nothing but
relaxation from the former. Then objects of real utility can enter into his studies
and induce him to give a more constant application than he gave to simple play. The
irrepressible law of necessity always teaches man early to do what does not please
him in order to prevent an evil which would displease him more. Such is the use of
foresight, and from this foresight, well or ill controlled, is bom all human wisdom
or all human misery.
Every man wants to be happy; but to succeed in being so, one would have to begin by
knowing what happiness is. The happiness of the natural man is as simple as his
life. It consists in not suffering; health, freedom, and the necessities of life
constitute it. The happiness of the moral man is something else. But that kind of
happiness is not the question here. I cannot repeat too often that only physical
objects can
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EMILE
interest children, especially those whose vanity has not been awakened, and who
have not been corrupted ahead of time by the poison of opinion.
When they foresee their needs before feeling them, their intelligence is already
quite advanced, and they begin to know the value of time. It is then important to
accustom them to direct its employment to useful objects—but objects whose utility
they can sense at their age and is within the reach of their understanding. All
that depends on the moral order and on the practice of society ought not to be
presented to them yet, because they are not in a condition to understand it. It is
inept to demand that they apply themselves to things one tells them vaguely are for
their own good (without their knowing what that good is) and to things they are
assured they will profit from when they are grown up (without their taking any
interest now in that alleged profit, which they would not be able to understand).
Let the child do nothing on anybody's word. Nothing is good for him unless he feels
it to be so. In always pushing him ahead of his understanding, you believe you are
using foresight, and you lack it. To arm him with some vain instruments which he
will perhaps never use, you take away from him man's most universal instrument,
which is good sense. You accustom him to let himself always be led, never to be
anything but a machine in others' hands. You want him to be docile when little:
that is to want him to be credulous and a dupe when he is grown up. You constantly
tell him, "All that I ask of you is for your own advantage. But you are not in a
condition to know it. What difference does it make to me whether you do what I
demand? It is only for you yourself that you are working." With all these fine
speeches that you make to him now in order to get him to be obedient, you are
preparing the success of those speeches which will be made to him one day by a
visionary, an alchemist, a charlatan, a cheat, or any kind of madman in order to
catch your pupil in his trap or to get him to adopt his madness.
It is important for a man to know many things whose utility a child could not
understand. But must and can a child learn everything it is important for a man to
know? Try to teach the child everything useful for his age, and you will see that
all his time will be more than filled. Why do you, to the detriment of the studies
which are suitable for him today, want to apply him to those of an age which it is
so uncertain he will reach? "But," you will say, "will there be time to learn what
one ought to know when the moment has come to make use of it?"I do not know. But I
do know that it is impossible to learn it sooner,Jior our true masters are
experience and sentiment, /and man has a good "sense of what SUltS man only with
tespeulTo tnose relations in which he himself has actually participated. A child
knows that he is made to become a man; all the ideas he can have of man's estate
are opportunities of instruction for him; but he must remain in absolute ignorance
of ideas of that estate which are not within his reach. My whole book is only a
constant proof of this principle of education.
As soon as we have succeeded in giving our pupil an idea of the word useful, we
have another great hold for governing him, for this word is very striking to him,
provided only that it has a sense relative to his
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age and that he sees clearly its relation to his present well-being. Your children
are not struck by this word because you have not been careful to give them an idea
of it that is within their reach; and because others always take care of providing
what is useful for your children, they never need to think about it themselves and
do not know what utility is.
"What is that good for?" This is now the sacred word, the decisive word between him
and me in all the actions of our life. This is the question of mine which
infallibly follows all his questions and which serves as a brake to those
multitudes of stupid and tedious interrogations with which children ceaselessly and
fruitlessly fatigue all those around them, more to exercise some kind of dominion
over them than to get some profit. He who is taught as his most important lesson to
want to know nothing but what is useful interrogates like Socrates. He does not put
a question without giving himself the reason for it, which he knows will be
demanded of him before he is answered.
See what a powerful instrument for acting on your pupil I am putting into your
hands. Not knowing the reasons for anything, he is now almost reduced to silence
whenever you please. And what an advantage your knowledge and experience give you
for showing him the utility of everything you suggest to him! For—do not be
deceived—to put this question to him is to teach him to put it to you in turn; and
afterward you must count on his following your example and asking about everything
you suggest to him, "What is that good for?"
This is perhaps the most difficult trap for a governor to avoid. If at the child's
question you seek only to get out of it and give him a single reason he is not in a
condition to understand, he will see that you reason according to your ideas and
not his and will believe that what you tell him is good for your age and not for
his. He will no longer rely on you, and all is lost. But where is the master who is
willing to stop short and admit his failings to his pupil? All make it a law for
themselves not to admit even those failings they have, while I would make it my law
to admit even those I do not have when I cannot put my reasons within his reach.
Thus my conduct, always clear in his mind, would never be suspect to him, and I
would preserve more credit for myself in pretending I have faults than other
masters do in hiding theirs.
In the first place, you should be well aware that it is rarely up to you to suggest
to him what he ought to learn. It is up to him to desire it, to seek it, to find
it. It is up to you to put it within his reach, skillfully to give birth to this
desire and to furnish him with the means of satisfying it. It follows, therefore,
that your questions should be infrequent but well chosen; since he will put many
more questions to you than you to him, you will always be less exposed and more
often in the position to say to him, "In what way is what you ask me useful to
know?"
Moreover, it is of little importance whether he learns this or that, provided that
he get a good conception of what he learns and the use of what he learns;
therefore, if you do not have any clarification of what you say which is valid for
him, do not give him one at all. Tell
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EMILE
him without scruple, "I do not have a good response to make to you. I was wrong.
Let us leave it at that." If your instruction was really misplaced, there is no
harm in simply abandoning it. If it was not misplaced, with a bit of effort you
will soon find the occasion to make its utility palpable to him.
I do not like explanations in speeches. Young people pay little attention to them
and hardly retain them. Things, things! I shall never repeat enough that we
attribute too much power to words. With our babbling education we produce only
babblers.
Let us suppose that while I am studying with my pupil the course of the sun and how
to get one's bearings, suddenly he interrupts me to ask what is the use of all
that. What a fine speech I will make to him! I shall seize the occasion to instruct
him about so many things in answering his question, especially if we have witnesses
to our conversation! * I shall tell him of the utility of travels, of the
advantages of commerce, of the products peculiar to each climate, of the manners of
different peoples, of the use of the calendar, of the calculation of the return of
the seasons for agriculture, of the art of navigation, of the means to find one's
way at sea and to follow one's route exactly without knowing where one is.
Politics, natural history, astronomy, even morality and the right of nations will
enter into my explanation in such a way as to give my pupil a great idea of all
these sciences and a great desire to learn them. When I have finished, I shall have
made a true pedant's display of which he will have understood not a single idea. He
will have a great longing to ask me, as before, what is the use of getting one's
bearings, but he does not dare for fear that I will get angry. He finds it more to
his advantage to feign understanding of what he has been forced to hear. That is
the way fine educations are given.
But our Emile, more rustically raised and with so much effort made a slow learner,
will not listen to any of that. At the first word he does not understand, he is
going to run away, frolic around the room, and let me perorate all alone. Let us
seek a cruder solution. My scientific gear is worthless for him.
We were observing the position of the forest north of Montmorency when he
interrupted me with his importunate question, "What's the use of that?" "You are
right," I say to him, "we must think about it at our leisure, and if we find that
this work is good for nothing, we won't pick it up again, for we have no lack of
useful entertainments." We busy ourselves with something else, and geography is not
an issue for the rest of the day.
The next morning I suggest to him a walk before lunch. He does not ask for better.
Children are always ready to take a run, and this one has good legs. We go up to
the forest; we roam the fields; we get lost; we no longer know where we are; and
when we have to go back, we can no longer find our path again. Time passes; it gets
hot; we are hungry. We hurry; we wander in vain in one direction and another. We
find everywhere only woods, quarries, plains, and no sign by which to
* I have often noticed that in the learned instructions one gives to children one
thinks less of getting a hearing from them than from the grownups who are present.
I am very sure about what I am saying here, for I have observed it in myself.
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BOOK III
locate ourselves. Very hot, very tired, and very hungry, we accomplish nothing by
our racing around other than to get more lost. Finally we sit down to rest and
deliberate. Emile, who I am supposing has been raised like any child, does not
deliberate; he cries. He does not know we are at the gate of Montmorency and that a
simple copse hides it from us. But this copse is a forest for him; a man of his
stature is buried in bushes.
After some moments of silence I say to him with a worried air, "My dear Emile, what
shall we do to get out of here?"
emile (all in a sweat and crying hot tears) I don't know. I'm tired, I'm hungry,
I'm thirsty. I can't go on.
jean-jacques Do you believe I am in a better condition than you, and do you think I
would blame myself for crying if my tears would do for my lunch? Crying isn't what
has to be done. What we have to do is find ourselves. Let's see your watch. What
time is it?
emile It's noon, and I haven't eaten.
jean-jacques That's true. It is noon, and I haven't eaten.
emile Oh, how hungry you must be!
jean-jacques The misfortune is that my dinner won't come and look for me here. It
is noon? That is exactly the time yesterday when we were observing the position of
the forest from Montmorency. If we could observe the position of Montmorency from
the forest in the same way. . . ."
emile Yes, but yesterday we saw the forest, and from here we don't see the city.
jean-jacques That's the difficulty. ... If we could find its position without
seeing it. . . .
emile Oh, my good friend!
jean-jacques Did we not say that the forest was . . .
emile North of Montmorency. . . .
jean-jacques Consequently Montmorency ought to be . . .
emile South of the forest.
jean-jacques We have a means of finding the north at noon.
emile Yes, by the direction of the shadow.
jean-jacques But the south?
emile What's to be done?
jean-jacques South is the opposite of north.
emile That's true. We have only to look for the opposite of the shadow. Oh, there
is the south! There is the south! Surely Montmorency is in that direction. Let's
look in that direction.
jean-jacques You might be right. Let's take this path through the woods.
emile (clapping his hands and letting out a cry of joy) Oh, I see Montmorency!
There it is straight ahead of us in full view. Let's have lunch! Let's dine! Let's
run fast! Astronomy is good for something.
Note that if he does not say this last phrase, he will think it. What is the
difference, provided that it is not I who say it? Now, you can be
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EMILE
certain that he will not in his life forget this day's lesson; whereas if I had
only made him suppose all this in his room, my speech would have been forgotten the
very next day. One must speak as much as one can by deeds and say only what one
does not know how to do.
The reader does not expect me to despise him so much as to give him an example for
every kind of study. But whatever the question may be, I cannot exhort the governor
too much to be sure that his proofs match the pupil's capacity to understand them;
for, to repeat, the harm is not in what the pupil does not understand but is in
what he believes he understands.
I remember that once I wanted to give a child a taste for chemistry, and after I
had shown him precipitates of several metals, I explained to him how ink is made. I
told him that its blackness comes only from iron very finely broken up, separated
from the vitriol and precipitated by an alkaline solution. In the midst of my
learned explanation the little traitor stopped me short with my question, which I
had taught him. Now I was quite at a loss.
After having mused about it a bit, I made my decision. I sent for wine from the
master of the house's cellar and for another wine at eight ppnnies from a wine
merchant's. I took a fixed alkaline solution in a little flask. Then, with these
two different wines in two glasses before me,* I spoke to him thus:
"Many foodstuffs are adulterated to make them appear to be better than they are.
These adulterations deceive the eye and the taste, but they are harmful and make
the adulterated thing, for all its fine appearance, worse than it was before.
"Drinks, particularly wines, are adulterated, because the deception is more
difficult to recognize and gives more profit to the deceiver.
"The adulteration of green or bitter wines is done with litharge. Litharge is a
lead preparation. Lead combined with acids makes a very mild salt which corrects
the greenness of wine to the taste but is poison for those who drink it. It is,
therefore, important before drinking suspect wine to know whether or not it has
been treated with litharge. Now here is how I reason in order to discover this.
"The solution of wine contains not only inflammable spirits, as you have seen from
the brandy drawn from it; it contains, in addition, acid, as you can know from the
vinegar and the tartar also gotten from it.
"Acid has a relation to metallic substances and combines with them by dissolving
them to form a compound salt, such as rust for example (which is only iron
dissolved by the acid contained in air or water), and also verdegris (which is only
copper dissolved in vinegar).
"But this same acid has even more relation to alkaline substances than to metallic
substances, so that at the intervention of the former in the compound salts of
which I just spoke to you, the acid is forced to let go of the metal with which it
is combined to attach itself to the alkali.
* For each explanation one wants to give the child, a little ceremony which
precedes it is very useful in making him attentive.
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BOOK III
"Then the metallic substance, released from the acid which kept it dissolved,
precipitates and makes the liquid opaque.
"If, therefore, one of these two wines is treated with litharge, its acid keeps the
litharge in solution. When I pour alkaline liquid into it, it will force the acid
to let go of its hold to combine with it. The lead, no longer kept in solution,
will reappear, cloud the solution, and finally precipitate at the bottom of the
glass.
"If there is no lead * or any other metal in the wine, the alkali will combine
peacefully t with the acid, the whole will remain dissolved, and there will be no
precipitate."
Then I poured my alkaline solution into each of the two glasses. The one with the
house wine remained clear and diaphanous. The other was cloudy in a moment, and at
the end of an hour one clearly saw the lead precipitate at the bottom of the glass.
"Here," I went on, "is natural and pure wine that can be drunk; and here is
adulterated wine that poisons. This is discovered by means of the same knowledge
about whose utility you asked. He who knows well how ink is made also knows how to
recognize doctored wines."
I was quite satisfied by my example; nevertheless, I perceived that the child was
not struck by it. I needed a bit of time to sense that I had only committed a
blunder; for—not to speak of the impossibility of a twelve-year-old child's
following my explanation—the usefulness of this experiment never entered his mind.
Having tasted the two wines and finding them both good, the word adulteration,
which I thought I had explained to him so well, did not correspond to any idea he
had. The other words—unhealthy, poison—did not even have any meaning for him. He
was, in this respect, in the same situation as the historian of the physician
Philip.7 That is the situation of all children.
Relations of effects to causes whose connection we do not perceive, goods and ills
of which we have no idea, needs we have never experienced—these are nothing to us.
It is impossible by means of them to interest us in doing anything which relates to
them. At fifteen one sees the happiness of a wise man as one does the glory of
paradise at thirty. If one does not have a good conception of these, one will do
little to acquire them; and even if one does conceive of them, one will still do
little to acquire them if one does not desire them, if one does not feel them to be
suitable to oneself. It is easy to prove to a child that what one wants to teach
him is useful; but to prove it is nothing if one does not know how to persuade him.
In vain does tranquil reason make us approve or criticize; it is only passion which
makes us act—and how can one get passionate about interests one does not yet have?
Never show the child anything he cannot see. While humanity is
* The wines sold retail by the wine merchants of Paris, although they are not
always treated with litharge, are rarely free of lead, because the counters of
these merchants are covered with this metal, and the wine which overflows the
measuring cup comes into contact with this lead, stays on it for a time, and always
dissolves some part of it. It is strange that so manifest and so dangerous an abuse
is tolerated by the police. But it is true that people in easy circumstances,
hardly drinking those wines, are little subject to being poisoned by them.
t Vegetable acid is very mild. If it were a mineral acid and less diluted, the
combination would not take place without effervescence.
[l83]
EMILE
almost alien to him, and you are unable to raise him to man's estate, for his sake
lower man to the child's estate. In thinking about what can be useful to him at
another age, speak to him only about things whose utility he sees right now.
Moreover, let there never be any comparisons with other children, no rivals, no
competitors, not even in running, once he has begun to be able to reason. I prefer
a hundred times over that he not learn what he would only learn out of jealousy or
vanity. However, every year I shall note the progress he has made; I shall compare
it to that which he will make the following year. I shall tell him, "You have grown
so many inches. That is the ditch you jumped over, the load you carried, the
distance you threw a pebble, the course you ran before getting winded, etc. Let us
now see what you will do." Thus I arouse him without making him jealous of anyone.
He will want to outdo himself. He ought to. I see no problem in his being his own
competitor.
I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know. It is said
that Hermes engraved the elements of the sciences on columns in order to shelter
his discoveries from a flood.8 If he had left a good imprint of them in man's head,
they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-prepared minds are the surest
monuments on which to engrave human knowledge.
Is there no means of bringing together so many lessons scattered in so many books,
of joining them in a common object which is easy to see and interesting to follow
and can serve as a stimulant even at this age? If one can invent a situation where
all man's natural needs are shown in a way a child's mind can sense, and where the
means of providing for these needs emerge in order with equal ease, it is by the
lively and naive depiction of this state that the first exercise must be given to
his imagination.9
Ardent philosopher, I see your imagination kindling already. Do not put yourself
out. This situation has been found; it has been described and, without prejudice to
you, much better than you would describe it yourself—at least with more truth and
simplicity. Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one which, to my
taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will
be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his
whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there. It will be the
text for which all our discussions on the natural sciences will serve only as a
commentary. It will serve as a test of the condition of our judgment during our
progress; and so long as our taste is not spoiled, its reading will always please
us. What, then, is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny? Is it Buffon?
No. It is Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe on his island, alone, deprived of the assistance of his kind and
the instruments of all the arts, providing nevertheless for his subsistence, for
his preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of well-being—this is an
object interesting for every age and one which can be made agreeable to children in
countless ways. This is how we realize the desert island which served me at first
as a comparison. This state, I agree, is not that of social man; very likely it is
not going
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BOOK III
to be that of Emile. But it is on the basis of this very state that he ought to
appraise all the others. The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and
ordering one's judgments about the true relations of things is to put oneself in
the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to
judge of it with respect to his own utility.
This novel, disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson's shipwreck
near his island and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him
from it, will be both Emile's entertainment and instruction throughout the period
which is dealt with here. I want it to make him dizzy; I want him constantly to be
busy with his mansion, his goats, his plantations; I want him to learn in detail,
not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want
him to think he is Robinson himself, to see himself dressed in skins, wearing a
large cap, carrying a large saber and all the rest of the character's grotesque
equipment, with the exception of the parasol, which he will not need. I want him to
worry about the measures to take if this or that were lacking to him; to examine
his hero's conduct; to investigate whether he omitted anything, whether there was
nothing to do better; to note Robinson's failings attentively; and to profit from
them so as not to fall into them himself in such a situation. For do not doubt that
he is planning to go and set up a similar establishment. This is the true "castle
in Spain" of this happy age when one knows no other happiness than the necessities
and freedom.
What a resource this folly would be for a skillful man who knew how to engender it
solely for the sake of taking advantage of it. The child, in a hurry to set up a
storehouse for his island, will be more ardent for learning than is the master for
teaching. He will want to know all that is useful, and he will want to know only
that. You will not need to guide him; you will have only to restrain him. Now let
us hurry to establish him on this island while he still limits his felicity to it;
for the day is nearing when, if he still wants to live there, he will not want any
longer to live there alone, and when Friday, who now hardly concerns him, will not
for long be enough for him.
The practice of the natural arts, for which a single man suffices, leads to the
investigation of the arts of industry, which need the conjunction of many hands.
The former can be exercised by solitaries, by savages; but the others can be born
only in society and make it necessary. So long as one knows only physical need,
each man suffices unto himself. The introduction of the superfluous makes division
and distribution of labor indispensable; although a man working alone earns only
subsistence for one man, a hundred men working in harmony will earn enough to give
subsistence to two hundred. Therefore, as soon as a part of mankind rests, it is
necessary that the joint efforts of those who work make up for the idleness of
those who do nothing.
Your greatest care ought to be to keep away from your pupil's mind all notions of
social relations which are not within his reach. But when the chain of knowledge
forces you to show him the mutual dependence of men, instead of showing it to him
from the moral side, turn all his
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EMILE
attention at first toward industry and mechanical arts which make men useful to one
another. In taking him from workshop to workshop, never allow him to view any work
without putting his hand to the job himself or to leave without knowing perfectly
the reason for all that is done there, or at least all that he has observed. To
achieve this, work yourself; everywhere provide the example for him. To make him a
master, be everywhere an apprentice; and reckon that an hour of work will teach him
more things than he would retain from a day of explanations.
There is a public esteem attached to the different arts in inverse proportion to
their real utility. This esteem is calculated directly on the basis of their very
uselessness, and this is the way it ought to be. The most useful arts are those
which earn the least, because the number of workers is proportioned to men's needs,
and work necessary to everybody must remain at a price the poor man can pay. On the
other hand, these important fellows who are called artists instead of artisans, and
who work solely for the idle and the rich, set an arbitrary price on their baubles.
Since the merit of these vain works exists only in opinion, their very price
constitutes a part of that merit, and they are esteemed in proportion to what they
cost. The importance given them by the rich does not come from their use but from
the fact that the poor cannot afford them. Nolo habere bona nisi quibus papulus
inviderit.*
What will your pupils become if you let them adopt this stupid prejudice, if you
encourage it yourself, if, for example, they see you enter a goldsmith's shop with
more respect than a locksmith's? What judgment will they make of the true merit of
arts and the veritable value of things, when they see that the price is set by whim
everywhere in contradiction to the price based on real utility, and that the more a
thing costs the less it is worth? The first moment you let these ideas into their
heads, abandon the rest of their education. In spite of you, they will be raised
like everyone else. You have wasted fourteen years of effort.
Emile, planning to furnish his island, will have other ways of seeing. Robinson
Crusoe would have attached much more importance to a toolmaker's shop than to all
Said's n gewgaws. The former would have appeared to him to be a very respectable
man, and the other a little charlatan.
"My son is made to live with others. He will live not with wise men but with
madmen. Therefore, he must know their madnesses since they wish to be led by them.
The real knowledge of things may be good, but that of men and their judgments is
even more valuable, for in human society the greatest instrument of man is man, and
the wisest is he who best makes use of this instrument. What is the use of giving
children the idea of an imaginary order which is entirely opposed to the
established one they will find and according to which they will have to govern
themselves? Give them lessons in the first place for being wise, and then you can
give them lessons for judging how other men are mad."
* Petronius.10
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BOOK III
These are the specious maxims which guide the false prudence of fathers in making
their children slaves of the prejudices they feed them and playthings themselves of
the senseless mob which they expect to make the tool of their passions. To get to
know man, how many things must be known before him! Man is the last study of the
wise, and you claim to make it a child's first! Before instructing him in our
sentiments, begin by teaching him to evaluate them. Does one know a folly when one
takes it to be reasonable? To be wise one must discern what is not wise. How will
your child know men if he does not know how to judge their judgments or detect
their errors? It is bad to know what they think when one does not know whether what
they think is true or false. Teach him, therefore, in the first place what things
are in themselves, and you can teach him afterward what they are in our eyes. It is
thus that he will know how to compare the opinion to the truth and to raise himself
above the vulgar; for one does not know prejudices when one adopts them, and one
does not lead the people when one resembles them. But if you begin by instructing
him in public opinion before teaching him to appraise it, rest assured that,
whatever you may do, it will become his, and you will no longer be able to destroy
it. I draw the conclusion that to make a young man judicious, we must form his
judgments well instead of dictating ours to him.
You see that up to now I have not spoken of men to my pupil. He would have had too
much good sense to listen to me. He does not yet have a sufficient sense of his
relations with his species to be able to judge of others by himself. He knows no
human being other than himself alone, and he is even far from knowing himself. But
if he makes few judgments about his person, at least he makes only exact ones. He
does not know the place of others, but he feels his own and stays in it. In place
of the social laws which he cannot know, we have bound him with the chains of
necessity. He is still almost only a physical being. Let us continue to treat him
as such.
It is by their palpable relation to his utility, his security, his preservation,
and his well-being that he ought to appraise all the bodies of nature and all the
works of men. Thus, iron ought to be much more valuable in his eyes than gold, and
glass than diamonds. Similarly, he honors a shoemaker or a mason far more than a
Lempereur, a Le-blanc,12 and all the jewelers of Europe. A pastry chef especially
is a very important man in his eyes, and he would give the whole Academy of
Sciences for the lowest candymaker of the rue des Lombards. The goldsmiths, the
engravers, and the gilders are in his view nothing but loafers who play perfectly
useless games. He does not treat even clock-making very seriously. The happy child
enjoys time without being its slave. He profits from it and does not know its
value. The calm of the passions, which makes the passage of time always uniform,
takes the place for him of an instrument for measuring it at need.* In assuming he
has a watch as well as in making him cry, I gave myself a common
* Time loses its measure for us when our passions want to adjust its course
according to their taste. The wise man's watch is evenness of temper and peace of
soul. He is always on time for himself, and he always knows what that time is.
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EMILE
Emile, to be useful and to make myself understood; for, with respect to the true
one, a child so different from others would not serve as an example for anything.
There is an order no less natural and still more judicious by which one considers
the arts according to the relations of necessity which connect them, putting in the
first rank the most independent and in the last those which depend on a greater
number of others. This order, which provides important considerations about the
order of society in general, is similar to the preceding one and subject to the
same inversion in men's esteem. The result of this is that raw materials are used
in crafts without honor and almost without profit, and that the more hands they
pass through, the more labor increases in price and becomes honorable. I am not
examining whether it is true that the skill is greater and merits more recompense
in the detailed arts which give the final form to these materials than in the
initial work which converts them to the use of men. But I do say that, with each
thing, the art whose use is the most general and the most indispensable is incon-
testably the one which merits the most esteem; and the one to which other arts are
less necessary also merits esteem ahead of the more subordinate ones, because it is
freer and nearer independence. These are the true rules for appraising the arts and
manufactures. Anything else is arbitrary and depends on opinion.
The first and most respectable of all the arts is agriculture; I would put
ironworking in the second rank, woodworking in the third, and so on. The child who
has not been seduced by vulgar prejudices will judge of them precisely thus. What
important reflections on this point our Emile will draw from his Robinson Crusoe\
What will he think on seeing that the arts are only perfected in being subdivided,
in infinitely multiplying the instruments of all of them? He will say to himself,
"All these people are stupidly ingenious. One would believe they are afraid that
their arms and their fingers might be of some use, so many instruments do they
invent to do without them. To practice a single art they are subjected to countless
others. A city is needed for every worker. As for my companion and me, we put our
genius in our adroitness. We make ourselves tools that we can take everywhere with
us. All those people so proud of their talents in Paris would not know how to do
anything on our island and would be our apprentices in their turn."
Reader, do not stop here to view the training of our pupil's body and the skill of
his hands; but consider what direction we are giving to his childish curiosities;
consider his sense, his inventive spirit, and his foresight; consider what a head
we are putting on his shoulders. In all that he will see, in all that he will do,
he will want to know everything; he will want to learn the reason for everything.
From instrument to instrument he will want always to go back to the first; he will
accept no assumption. He would refuse to learn whatever demands prior knowledge he
does not have. If he sees a spring, he will want to know how the steel was taken
from the mine. If he sees the pieces of a box being assembled, he will want to know
how the tree was cut. If he works himself, with every tool he uses he will not fail
to ask himself,
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"If I did not have this tool, how would I go about making one like it or doing
without it?"
An error difficult to avoid is always to assume the child has the same taste for
the activities about which the master is enthusiastic. When the entertainment of
work carries you away, be careful that in the meantime he is not bored without
daring to indicate it to you. The child ought to be wholly involved with the thing,
but you ought to be wholly involved with the child—observing him, spying on him
without letup and without appearing to do so, sensing ahead of time all his
sentiments and forestalling those he ought not to have—in a word, busying him in
such a way that he not only feels he is of use in the work but is pleased by dint
of understanding well the purpose of that work.
The society of the arts consists in exchange of skills, that of commerce in
exchange of things, that of banks in exchange of signs and money. All these ideas
are connected, and the elementary notions are already grasped. We laid the
foundations for all this at an early age with the help of Robert, the gardener. It
only remains for us now to generalize these same ideas and extend them to more
examples to make him understand the workings of trade taken by itself and presented
to his senses by the details of natural history regarding the products peculiar to
each country, by the details of arts and sciences regarding navigation, and
finally, by the greater or lesser problems of transport according to distance, the
situation of lands, seas, rivers, etc.
No society can exist without exchange, no exchange without a common measure, and no
common measure without equality. Thus all society has as its first law some
conventional equality, whether of men or of things.
Conventional equality among men, very different from natural equality, makes
positive right—that is, government and laws—necessary. The political knowledge of a
child ought to be distinct and limited; he ought to know about government in
general only what relates to the right of property, of which he already has some
idea.
Conventional equality among things prompted the invention of money, for money is
only a term of comparison for the value of things of different kinds; and in this
sense money is the true bond of society. But everything can be money. Once cattle
was; shells still are among many peoples; iron was money in Sparta; leather has
been in Sweden; gold and silver are among us.
Metals, since they are easier to transport, have generally been chosen as mean
terms for all exchanges; and these metals have been converted into money to spare
measuring or weighing at each exchange. For the stamping of money is only an
attestation that the piece thus stamped is of a certain weight; the prince alone
has the right to strike money, given that he alone has the right to demand that his
witness be authoritative among a whole people.
Thus explained, the use of this invention is made apparent to the stupidest of
persons. It is difficult to compare directly things of different natures—cloth, for
example, to wheat. But when one has found a common measure—money—it is easy for the
manufacturer and the farmer to relate to this common measure the value of the
things they want to
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EMILE
exchange. If such a quantity of cloth is worth such a sum of money, and such a
quantity of wheat should also be worth the same sum of money, it follows that the
merchant, receiving this wheat for his cloth, makes an equitable exchange. Thus it
is by money that goods of various kinds become commensurable and can be compared.
Do not go farther than this, and do not enter into an explanation of the moral
effects of this institution. With all things it is important that the uses be well
presented before the abuses are shown. If you aspire to explain to children how the
signs make the things neglected, how all the chimeras of opinion are born from
money, how countries rich in money must be poor in everything else, you would be
treating these children not only as philosophers but as wise men, and you would be
aspiring to make them understand a thing of which even few philosophers have had a
good conception.
To what an abundance of interesting objects can one thus turn a pupil's curiosity
without ever abandoning the real material relations which are within his reach or
allowing a single idea that he cannot conceive to spring up in his mind! The art of
the master consists in never letting his pupil's observations dwell on minutiae
which lead nowhere but in bringing him ever closer to the great relations he must
know one day in order to judge well of the good and bad order of civil society. One
must know how to match the conversations with which one entertains him to the turn
of mind he has been given. A question which could not even stir the attention of
another is going to torment Emile for six months.
We go to dine in an opulent home. We find the preparations for a feast—many people,
many lackeys, many dishes, an elegant and fine table service. All this apparatus of
pleasure and festivity has something intoxicating about it which goes to the head
when one is not accustomed to it. I have a presentiment of the effect of all this
on my young pupil. While the meal continues, while the courses follow one another,
while much boisterous conversation reigns at the table, I lean toward his ear and
say, "Through how many hands would you estimate that all you see on this table has
passed before getting here?" What a crowd of ideas I awaken in his brain with these
few words! Instantly, all the vapors of the delirium are dispelled. He dreams, he
reflects, he calculates, he worries. While the philosophers, cheered by the wine,
perhaps by the ladies next to them, prate and act like children, he is all alone
philosophizing for himself in his corner. He questions me; I refuse to answer; I
put him off to another time. He gets impatient; he forgets to eat and drink; he
burns to get away from the table to discuss with me at his ease. What an object for
his curiosity! What a text for his instruction! With a healthy judgment that
nothing has been able to corrupt, what will he think of this luxury when he finds
that every region of the world has been made to contribute; that perhaps twenty
million hands have worked for a long time; that it has cost the lives of perhaps
thousands of men, and all this to present to him with pomp at noon what he is going
to deposit in his toilet at night?
Spy out with care the secret conclusions he draws in his heart from
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all his observations. If you have guarded him less well than I assume, he may be
tempted to turn his reflections in another direction and to regard himself as an
important person in the world, seeing so many efforts concerted to prepare his
dinner. If you get a presentiment of this reasoning, you can easily forestall it
before he makes it, or at least efface its impression immediately. Not yet knowing
how to appropriate things other than by material enjoyment, he can judge of their
suitability or lack of it for him only by means of relations accessible to his
senses. The comparison of a simple, rustic dinner, prepared by exercise, seasoned
by hunger, freedom, and joy, with his magnificent formal feast will suffice to make
him feel that all the apparatus of the feast did not give him any real profit, and
that since his stomach left the peasant's table as satisfied as it left the
financier's, there was nothing more in the one than in the other that he could
truly call his own.
Let us imagine what a governor will be able to say to him in such a case-. "Recall
these two meals, and decide for yourself which you ate with the most pleasure. At
which did you notice more joy? At which did one eat with greater appetite, drink
more gaily, laugh more good-heartedly? Which went on longest without boredom and
without needing to be renewed by other courses? Meanwhile, look at the difference:
this wholewheat bread you find so good comes from wheat harvested by this peasant;
his wine, black and coarse but refreshing and healthy, is the product of his own
vine; the linen comes from his hemp, woven in the winter by his wife, his
daughters, and his servant girl. No hands other than those of his family made the
preparations for his table; the nearest mill and the neighboring market are the
limits of the universe for him. In what way then did you really enjoy everything
additional provided for that other table by distant lands and the hands of men? If
all that did not give you a better meal, what have you gained from this abundance?
What was in it that was made for you? If you had been the master of the house," he
will be able to add, "all this would have remained even more alien to you, for the
effort of displaying your enjoyment to the eyes of others would have succeeded in
taking that enjoyment away from you. You would have had the discomfort, and they
the pleasure."
This speech may be very fine, but it is worthless for Emile, whose reach it exceeds
and whose reflections are not dictated by others. Speak to him therefore more
simply. After these two tests say to him one morning, "Where shall we dine today?
Next to that mountain of silver which covers three-quarters of the table and those
beds of paper flowers which are served on mirrors with dessert? Amidst those women
with great skirts who treat you like a puppet and insist that you have said what
you do not know? Or, rather, in that village two leagues from here with those good
people who receive us so joyfully and give us such good custard?" There is no doubt
about Emile's choice, for he is neither a babbler nor vain. He cannot endure
constraint, and all our delicate relishes do not please him. But he is always ready
to run in the country, and he very much likes good fruits, good vegetables,
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EMILE
good custard, and good people.* On our way, the reflection comes of itself. I see
that these crowds of men who work at these grand meals simply waste their efforts,
or that they hardly think of our pleasures.
My examples, good perhaps for one pupil, will be bad for countless others. If one
catches the spirit of these examples, one will surely know how to vary them
according to need. The choice depends on the genius peculiar to each pupil, and the
study of that genius depends on the occasions one offers each to reveal himself. It
cannot be imagined that, in the space of the three or four years we have to fill
here, we can give the most fortunately born child a sufficient idea of all the arts
and all the natural sciences for him to learn them one day by himself. But in thus
making all the objects it is important for him to know pass before him, we put him
in a position to develop his taste and his talent, to make the first steps toward
the object to which his genius leads him, and to indicate to us the route which
must be opened to him in order to assist nature.
Another advantage of this chain of limited but precise knowledge is to show him the
different kinds of knowledge in their connections and relations, to give them all a
place in his esteem, and to forestall in him the prejudices most men have in favor
of the talents they cultivate and against those they have neglected. He who sees
well the order of the whole sees the place where each part ought to be. He who sees
a part well and knows it in depth may be a learned man; the other is a judicious
man; and you remember that what we are proposing to acquire is less science than
judgment.
However that may be, my method is independent of my examples. It is founded on the
measure of man's faculties at his different ages and on the choice of occupations
which suit these faculties. I believe that another method would easily be found
which would appear to do better. But if it were less appropriate to the species,
the age, the sex, I doubt that it would have the same success.
In beginning this second period we have taken advantage of the superabundance of
our strength over our needs in order to take us outside of ourselves. We have
launched ourselves into the heavens; we have measured the earth; we have harvested
the laws of nature. In a word, we have visited the whole island. Now we come back
to ourselves. We are imperceptibly coming nearer to the place we dwell, only too
happy on returning there to find it still not possessed by the enemy which
threatens us and which is preparing to take hold of it!
What remains for us to do after having observed all that surrounds us? To convert
to our use all that we can appropriate for ourselves and to profit from our
curiosity for the advantage of our well-being. Up to
* The taste for the country I assume in my pupil is a natural fruit of his
education. Moreover, with none of the foppish and affected air which is so pleasing
to women, he is made less of by them than are other children. Consequently, he
enjoys himself less with them and is less spoiled by their society, whose charms he
is not yet in a condition to sense. I have been careful not to teach him to kiss
their hands, to say insipidities to them, or even to show them, in preference to
men, the attentions due them. I have set myself an inviolable law to demand nothing
from him whose reason is not within his reach, and there is no good reason for a
child to treat one sex differently from the other.
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BOOK III
now we have provided for instruments of every kind without knowing which we shall
need. Perhaps useless to ourselves, ours will be able to serve other men; and
perhaps, in our turn, we shall need theirs. Thus we would all be advantaged by
these exchanges. But to make them, our mutual needs must be known. Each must know
what others have which he can use and what he can offer them in return. Let us
suppose ten men, each of whom has ten sorts of needs. Each must, for what he needs,
apply himself to ten sorts of work; but, given the differences of genius and
talent, one man will be less successful at one sort of work, another man at
another. Although fit for diverse things, all will do the same ones and will be ill
served. Let us form a society of these ten men and let each apply himself, for
himself and for the nine others, to the kind of occupation which suits him best.
Each will profit from the talents of the others as if he alone had them all. Each
will perfect his own by continuous practice, and it will turn out that all ten,
perfectly well provided for, will even have a surplus for others. That is the
apparent principle of all our institutions. It is not part of my subject to examine
its consequences here. I have done it in another writing.13
According to this principle, a man who wanted to regard himself as an isolated
being, not depending at all on anything and sufficient unto himself, could only be
miserable. It would even be impossible for him to subsist. For, finding the whole
earth covered with thine and mine and having nothing belonging to him except his
body, where would he get his necessities? By leaving the state of nature, we force
our fellows to leave it, too. No one can remain in it in spite of the others, and
it would really be leaving it to want to remain when it is impossible to live
there, for the first law of nature is the care of preserving oneself.
Thus the ideas of social relations are formed little by little in a child's mind,
even before he can really be an active member of society. Emile sees that, in order
to have instruments for his use, he must in addition have instruments for the use
of other men with which he can obtain in exchange the things which are necessary to
him and are in their power. I easily bring him to feel the need for these exchanges
and to put himself in a position to profit from them.
"My lord, I have to live," said an unfortunate satiric author to the minister who
reproached him for the disgracefulness of his trade. "I do not see why it is
necessary," the man in office responded coldly. This response, excellent for a
minister, would have been barbarous and false in any other mouth. Every man must
live. This argument, which is more or less weighty for a man to the extent he is
more or less humane, appears to me to be unanswerable for him who makes it relative
to himself. Since the aversion to dying is the strongest of all those aversions
nature gives us, it follows that it permits everything to anyone who has no other
possible means of living. The principles according to which the virtuous man learns
to despise his life and to sacrifice it to his duty are very far from this
primitive simplicity. Happy are the peoples among whom one can be good without
effort and just without virtue! If there is some miserable state in the world where
a
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EMILE
man cannot live without doing harm and where the citizens are rascals by necessity,
it is not the malefactor who should be hanged, but he who forces him to become one.
So soon as Emile knows what life is, my first care will be to teach him to preserve
it. Up to now I have not distinguished stations, ranks, and fortunes; and I shall
hardly distinguish them in what follows. This is because man is the saii.e in all
stations; the rich man does not have a bigger stomach than the poor one and does
not digest better than he; the master does not have arms longer or stronger than
his slave's; a man of great family is no greater than a man of the people; and
finally, as the natural needs are everywhere the same, the means of providing for
them ought to be equal everywhere. Suit the education of man to man, not to what is
not man. Do you not see that in working to form him exclusively for one station you
are making him useless for any other, and that if fortune pleases, you will have
worked only to make him unhappy? What is more ridiculous than a great lord who has
become destitute and brings the prejudices of his birth with him to his distress?
What is viler than an impoverished rich man who, remembering the contempt owed to
poverty, feels himself to have become the lowest of men? The one has as his only
recourse the trade of public rascal; the other that of crawling valet who uses this
fair phrase, "I have to live."
You trust in the present order of society without thinking that this order is
subject to inevitable revolutions, and it is impossible for you to foresee or
prevent the one which may affect your children. The noble become commoners, the
rich become poor, the monarch becomes subject. Are the blows of fate so rare that
you can count on being exempted from them? We are approaching a state of crisis and
the age of revolutions.* Who can answer for what will become of you then? All that
men have made, men can destroy. The only ineffaceable characters are those printed
by nature; and nature does not make princes, rich men, or great lords. What, then,
will this satrap whom you have raised only for greatness do in lowliness? What will
this publican who knows how to live only with gold do in poverty? What will this
gaudy imbecile, who does not know how to make use of himself and puts his being
only in what is alien to himself, do when he is deprived of everything? Happy is
the man who knows how to leave the station which leaves him and to remain a man in
spite of fate! That vanquished king who, full of rage, wants to be buried under the
debris of his throne may be praised as much as one pleases; I despise him. I see
that he exists only by his crown, and that he is nothing at all if he is not a
king. But he who loses it and does without it is then above it. From the rank of
king which a coward, a wicked man, or a madman can fill, he rises to the station of
man, which so few men know how to fill. Then he triumphs over fortune; he braves
it. He owes nothing except to himself; and when there remains nothing for him to
show
* I hold it to be impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to
last. All have shined, and every state which shines is on the decline. I have
reasons more particular than this maxim for my opinion, but it is unseasonable to
tell them, and everyone sees them only too well.
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BOOK III
except himself, he is not nothing, he is something. Yes, I prefer a hundred times
over the king of Syracuse becoming a schoolmaster at Corinth and the king of
Macedonia becoming a clerk at Rome14 to an unfortunate Tarquin not knowing what to
become if he does not reign, and to the heir and son of a king of kings,* the
plaything of whoever dares to insult his distress, wandering from court to court,
seeking help everywhere, and finding affronts everywhere for want of knowing how to
do anything other than perform a trade which is no longer in his power.
A man and a citizen, whoever he may be, has no property to put into society other
than himself. All his other property is in it in spite of him; and when a man is
rich, either he does not enjoy his riches or the public enjoys them, too. In the
first case, he robs from others that of which he deprives himself; and in the
second, he gives them nothing. Thus the social debt remains with him in its
entirety so long as he pays only with his property. "But my father, in earning it,
served society . . ." So be it; he has paid his debt, but not yours. You owe others
more than if you were born without property, since you were favored at birth. It is
not just that what one man has done for society should relieve another from what he
owes it; for each, owing himself wholly, can pay only for himself and no father can
transmit to his son the right to be useless to his fellows. This is, however, what
he does, according to you, in transmitting to him his riches, which are the proof
and the price of work. He who eats in idleness what he did not earn himself steals
it. A man whom the state pays an income for doing nothing hardly differs in my eyes
from a brigand who lives at the expense of passers-by. Outside of society isolated
man, owing nothing to anyone, has a right to live as he pleases. But in society,
where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them the price of his
keep in work. This is without exception. To work is therefore an indispensable duty
for social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a rascal.10
Now, of all the occupations which can provide subsistence to man, that which brings
him closest to the state of nature is manual labor. Of all conditions, the
artisan's is the most independent of fortune and men. The artisan depends only on
his work. He is as free as the farmer is slave. For the latter is dependent on his
field, whose harvest is at another's discretion. The enemy, the prince, a powerful
neighbor, or a lawsuit can take this field away from him. By means of this field he
can be vexed in countless ways. But wherever they want to vex the artisan, his
baggage is soon packed. He takes his hands and goes away. However, agriculture is
man's first trade. It is the most decent, the most useful, and consequently the
most noble he can practice. I do not say to Emile, "Learn agriculture." He knows
it. He is familiar with all the kinds of rustic work. He began with them, he
constantly returns to them. I say to him therefore, "Cultivate the inheritance of
your fathers. But if you lose that inheritance, or if you have none, what is to be
done? Learn a trade."
* Vonones, son of Phrates, king of the Parthians.15
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EMILE
"A trade for my son! My son an artisan! Sir, are you in your right mind?" I am
thinking clearly, more clearly than you, madame, who want to reduce him to never
being able to be anything but a lord, a marquess, a prince, and perhaps one day
less than nothing. I want to give him a rank which he cannot lose, a rank which
does him honor at all times; and whatever you may say about it, he will have fewer
equals with this title than with all those he will get from you.
The letter kills, and the spirit enlivens. The goal is less to learn a trade in
order to know a trade than to conquer the prejudices that despise a trade. You will
never be reduced to working to live. Well, too bad—too bad for you! But, that is
not important; do not work out of necessity; work out of glory. Lower yourself to
the artisan's station in order to be above your own. In order to subject fortune
and things to yourself, begin by making yourself independent of them. To reign by
opinion, begin by reigning over it.
Remember that it is not a talent that I ask of you. It is a trade, a true trade, a
purely mechanical art in which the hands work more than the head, one which does
not lead to fortune but enables one to do without it. In homes far above the danger
of lacking bread I have seen fathers carry foresight to such a point that they join
to the care of instructing their children that of providing them with knowledge
which in any eventuality they could draw on to live. These foresighted fathers
believe that they are doing a great deal. They are doing nothing, because the
resources they think they are husbanding for their children depend on that same
fortune above which they want to place them. The result is that with all these fine
talents, if he who has them does not find himself in circumstances favorable for
making use of them, he will perish from want just as if he had no talents.
As soon as it is a question of wiles and intrigues, one might as well use them to
maintain oneself in abundance as to regain, from the bosom of want, the means to
climb up to one's former station again. If you cultivate arts whose success depends
on the artist's reputation, if you make yourself fit for employments which are
obtained only by favor, of what use will all this be to you when you, because you
have become disgusted with society, will disdain the means without which one cannot
succeed in it? You have studied politics and the interests of princes. That is very
good. But what will you do with this knowledge if you do not know how to get to
ministers, to the women of the court, to the heads of bureaus, if you do not have
the secret of pleasing them, if all do not find in you the rascal who suits them?
You are an architect or a painter. So be it. But you have to make your talent
known. Do you think you can just start out by showing a work at the Salon? Oh, that
is not the way it goes! You have to belong to the Academy. You even have to have
pull in it in order to obtain some obscure place in a corner. Leave your ruler and
your brush, I tell you. Take a cab and run from door to door. It is thus that
celebrity is acquired. You ought to know that all these illustrious doors have
Swiss 1T or doormen who understand only by gesture and whose ears are in their
hands. Do you want to teach what you have learned and become a master of geography,
or mathematics, or languages, or music, or drawing? In order
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to do even that, you have to find students, and to do that, you have to find
boosters. Count on its being more important to be a charlatan than a capable man
and on your never being anything but an ignoramus if the only trade you know is
your own.
See, therefore, how little solid are all those brilliant resources and how many
other resources are necessary for you to take advantage of them. And then what will
become of you in this cowardly debasement? Reverses degrade you without instructing
you. How will you—more than ever a plaything of public opinion—raise yourself above
the prejudices which are the arbiters of your fate? How will you despise the
baseness and the vices which you need to subsist? You depended only on riches, and
now you depend on the rich. You have only worsened your slavery and added your
poverty on top of it. Now you are poor without being free. It is the worst
condition into which man can fall.
But if instead of having recourse, in order to live, to these high kinds of
knowledge, made for feeding the soul and not the body, you have recourse in need to
your hands and the use you know how to make of them, all the difficulties
disappear, all the wiles become useless. The resource is always ready when it has
to be used. Probity and honor are no longer an obstacle to life. You no longer need
to be a coward and a liar with the nobles, pliable and groveling with rascals,
basely obliging to everyone, a borrower or a thief—which are almost the same thing
when one has nothing. The opinion of others does not touch you. You do not have to
pay court to anyone; no fool to flatter, no Swiss to move, no courtesan to pay and,
what is worse, to butter up. That rogues have the conduct of great affairs is of
little importance to you. It will not prevent you, in your obscure life, from being
an honest man and having bread. You enter the first shop of the trade you have
learned. "Master, I need work." "Journeyman, set yourself there and work." Before
the dinner hour has come, you have earned your dinner. If you are diligent and
sober, before a week has passed you will have the means to live another week. You
will have lived free, healthy, true, industrious, and just. It is not wasting time
to earn your livelihood in this way.
I absolutely want Emile to learn a trade. A decent trade at least, will you say?
What does this word mean? Is not every trade decent that is useful to the public? I
do not want him to be an embroiderer, a gilder, or a varnisher, like Locke's
gentleman.18 I do not want him to be a musician, an actor, or a writer of books.
With the exception of these professions and those that resemble them, let him take
the one he wants. I do not presume to restrain him in anything. I prefer that he be
a shoemaker to a poet, that he pave highways to making porcelain flowers. But, you
will say, policemen, spies, and hangmen are useful people. They owe their
usefulness entirely to the government, which could also make them useless. But let
that pass. I was wrong. It does not suffice to choose a useful trade. It must,
further, not demand from those practicing it qualities of soul that are odious and
incompatible with humanity. Thus, returning to the first word, let us take a decent
trade. But let us always remember that there is no decency without utility.
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EMILE
A celebrated author of this age,19 whose books are full of great projects and small
views, took the vow, like all the priests of his communion, not to have a wife of
his own; but, being more scrupulous than the others about adultery, he is said to
have chosen the course of having pretty servants with whom he did his best to atone
for the outrage he had committed against his species by this rash commitment. He
regarded it as a citizen's duty to give other citizens to his country; and, with
the tribute of this kind he paid it, he peopled the class of artisans. As soon as
these children were at the proper age, he made all of them learn a trade that
suited their taste, excluding only professions that are idle, futile, or subject to
fashion, such as that of wigmaker, which is never necessary and can become useless
from one day to the next, so long as nature does not cease providing us with hair.
This is the spirit which should guide us in the choice of Emile's trade; or,
rather, it is not for us to make this choice but for him. For the maxims with which
he is imbued preserve in him the natural contempt for useless things, and thus he
will never want to consume his time in labors of no value. He knows no value in
things other than their real utility. He has to have a trade that could serve
Robinson Crusoe on his island.
In making the products of nature and art pass in review before a child, in exciting
his curiosity, in following him where it leads him, one has the advantage of
studying his tastes, his inclinations, and his penchants and of seeing the first
spark of his genius ignite, if he has one which is well denned. But a common error,
from which you must be preserved, is to attribute to the ardor of talent the effect
of circumstances and to take for a definite inclination to such and such an art the
imitative spirit common to man and ape, which leads both mechanically to want to do
everything they see done without quite knowing what it is good for. The world is
full of artisans, and especially of artists, who do not possess natural talent for
the art they practice but were pushed into it by others from an early age, whether
prompted by other considerations or deceived by an apparent zeal which would have
similarly led them to any other art if they had seen it practiced as soon. One
hears a drum and believes he is a general. Another sees a building and wants to be
an architect. Each is tempted by the trade he sees performed when he believes it is
esteemed.
I knew a lackey who, seeing his master paint and draw, took it into his head to be
a painter and drawer. From the moment he formed this resolve, he picked up the
pencil and no longer put it down except to pick up the brush, which he will never
put down for the rest of his life. Without lessons and without rules he set himself
to drawing everything that came to hand. He spent three whole years glued to his
scribblings, without anything other than his work able to tear him away from them
and without ever losing heart at the small progress that his mediocre gifts
permitted him to make. I saw him during six months of a hot summer—in a little
antechamber facing south where one suffocated just on passing through—seated, or
rather nailed, on his chair all day in front of a globe, drawing this globe and
drawing it again, constantly beginning and beginning again with invincible
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obstinacy, until he had rendered the high relief well enough to be satisfied with
his work. Finally, encouraged by his master and guided by an artist, he reached the
point of leaving the livery and living from his brush. Up to a certain limit
perseverance takes the place of talent. He has reached that limit and will never go
beyond it. The constancy and the emulation of this decent boy are laudable. He will
make himself esteemed forever for his assiduity, his fidelity, and his morals. But
he will never paint anything but pictures for the panels placed above doors. Who
would not have been deceived by his zeal and taken him for a true talent? There is
a great difference between enjoying some kind of work and being fit for it. We need
sharper observations than is thought to get assurances of the true genius and the
true taste of a child who shows his desires far more than his disposition, and who
is always judged by the former for want of knowing how to study the latter. I would
want a judicious man to give us a treatise on the art of observing children. This
art would be very important to know. Fathers and masters have not yet learned its
elements.
But perhaps we are giving too much importance here to the choice of a trade. Since
the issue is only one of some kind of work done with the hands, this choice is
nothing for Emile, and his apprenticeship is already more than half completed by
the exercises with which we have kept him busy up to now. What do you want him to
do? He is ready for anything. He already knows how to handle a spade and a hoe. He
knows how to use a lathe, a hammer, a plane, and a file. The tools of all the
trades are already familiar to him. The issue is now nothing more than to be able
to use one of these tools quickly and easily enough to equal in rapidity the good
workers who employ it. And he has in this respect a great advantage over them all:
he has an agile body and limbs flexible enough to enable him to get into all sorts
of postures without difficulty and to prolong all sorts of movements without
effort. Moreover, his organs are sound and well exercised. All the operations of
the arts are already known to him. In order to be able to work as a master, he
lacks only experience, and experience is gotten only with time. To which of the
trades from which we may still choose, then, will he give enough time to make
himself proficient at it? This is the only question left.
Give a man a trade which suits his sex and a young man a trade which suits his age.
Every sedentary and indoor profession which effeminates and softens the body
neither pleases nor suits him. Never did a young boy by himself aspire to be a
tailor. Art is required to bring to this woman's trade the sex for which it is not
made.* The needle and the sword cannot be wielded by the same hands. If I were
sovereign, I would permit sewing and the needle trades only to women and to
cripples reduced to occupations like theirs. Assuming eunuchs to be necessary, I
find it quite mad for Orientals to make them specially. Why are they not satisfied
with those made by nature, with those crowds of cowardly men whose heart it has
mutilated? They would have more than enough for the need. Every weak, delicate, and
fearful man is condemned by nature to a sedentary life. He is made to live with
women
* There were no tailors among the ancients. Men's costumes were made at home by the
women.
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EMILE
or in their manner. Let him practice one of those trades which are fit for them;
that is all very well. And if there absolutely must be true eunuchs, let men who
dishonor their sex by taking jobs which do not suit it be reduced to this
condition. Their choice proclaims nature's mistake. Correct its mistake one way or
another. You will have only done good.
I forbid my pupil unhealthy trades but not hard trades or even dangerous ones. They
exercise strength and courage at the same time; they are fit for men alone; women
do not pretend to them. How can men not be ashamed to encroach on those that women
do?
Lucatantur paucae, comedunt colliphia paucae. Vos lanam trahitis, calathisque
peracta refertis Vellera . . .*
In Italy one does not see women in shops, and nothing gloomier than the sight of
the streets in that country can be imagined by those who are accustomed to the
streets of France and England. On seeing fashion merchants sell ribbons, tassels,
net, and chenille to ladies, I found these delicate adornments quite ridiculous in
big hands made for using the bellows on a forge and striking an anvil. I said to
myself, "In this country the women ought to take reprisal by setting up shop as
swordmakers and gunsmiths." Oh, let each make and sell the arms of his own sex! To
know them, they must be used.
Young man, put the imprint of a man's hand on your labors. Learn to wield the ax
and the saw with a vigorous arm, to square a beam, to climb up to the roof of a
house, set the ridge on it, and prop it with struts and tie-rods. Then yell for
your sister to come to help you with your work as she told you to work at her
needlepoint.
I sense that I am saying too much about this for my refined contemporaries, but I
sometimes let myself be carried away by the force of arguments. If any man, whoever
he may be, is ashamed to work in public armed with a cooper's ax and girded with a
leather apron, I see in him nothing more than a slave of opinion, ready to blush at
doing good whenever decent people are ridiculed. However, let us cede to the
prejudice of fathers all that can do no harm to children's judgment. It is not
necessary to practice all the useful professions in order to honor them all. It
suffices not to esteem any as beneath oneself. When there is a choice and nothing
otherwise determines us, why should we not consult attractiveness, inclination, and
suitability in professions of the same rank? Metalwork is useful, even the most
useful of all. However, unless a special reason brings me to it, I will not make
your son a blacksmith, a locksmith, or an ironsmith. I would not like to see him at
his forge with the aspect of a Cyclops. Similarly, I will not make him a mason,
still less a shoemaker. All the trades have to be done. But he who can choose ought
to look to cleanliness, for this preference is not a result of opinion. On this
point the senses decide for us. Finally, I would not like those stupid professions
in
* Juvenal, Satires II 53-55.20
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which the workers, without industry and almost automatons, never exercise their
hand at anything but the same work—weavers, stocking makers, stonecutters. What is
the use of employing men of sense in these trades? It is a case of one machine
guiding another.
All things well considered, the trade I would most like to be to my pupil's taste
is the carpenter's. It is clean; it is useful; it can be practiced at home. It
keeps the body sufficiently in shape; it requires skill and industry from the
worker; and while the form of the work is determined by utility, elegance and taste
are not excluded.
If by chance your pupil's genius were definitely turned toward the speculative
sciences, then I would not blame his being given a trade conformable to his
inclinations—that he learn, for example, to make mathematical instruments,
spyglasses, telescopes, etc.21
When Emile learns his trade, I want to learn it with him, for I am convinced that
he will only ever learn well what we learn together. We shall, therefore, put both
of ourselves in apprenticeship; and we shall not expect to be treated as gentlemen
but as true apprentices who are not in it for laughs. Why should we not go the
whole way? Czar Peter was a carpenter in the workyard and a drummer for his own
troops. Do you think this prince is not your equal in birth or merit? You
understand that it is not to Emile that I say this. It is to you, whoever you may
be.
Unhappily we cannot spend all of our time at the workbench. We are not only
apprentice workers, we are apprentice men; and the apprenticeship in this latter
trade is harder and longer than in the former one. How will we do it then? Shall we
hire a master of the plane one hour a day as one hires a dancing master? No, for
then we would be not apprentices but disciples, and our ambition is not so much to
learn carpentry as to raise ourselves to the station of carpenter. Therefore, I am
of the opinion that we must go at least once or twice a week and spend the whole
day at the master's—that we get up at his hour, be at work before him, eat at his
table, work under his orders, and after having had the honor of supping with his
family, return, if we wish, to sleep in our hard beds. That is how several trades
are learned at once and how one gets practice in manual labor without neglecting
the other apprenticeship.
Let us be simple in doing good. Let us not go and reproduce vanity by our efforts
to combat it. To pride oneself on having conquered prejudices is to be subjected to
them. It is said that, by an ancient practice of the Ottoman house, the great lord
is obliged to work with his hands; and everyone knows that the works of a royal
hand can only be masterpieces. He therefore distributes magnificently these
masterpieces to the nobles of the Porte,22 and the work is paid for according to
the quality of the worker. The evil I see in this is not the alleged harassment;
that, on the contrary, is a good thing. By forcing the nobles to share with him the
spoils taken from the people, the prince is that much less obliged to pillage the
people directly. It is a relief necessary to despotism without which this horrible
government would not be able to subsist.
The true evil of such a practice is the idea of his merit which it
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EMILE
gives to this poor man. Like King Midas he sees everything he touches turn into
gold, but he does not perceive what ears grow as a result.23 To preserve short ones
for our Emile, let us protect his hands from that rich talent. Let the value of
what he makes be drawn not from the worker but from the work. Let us never allow
his work to be judged except by comparing it to that of good masters; let his work
be valued for the work itself and not because it is his. Say of what is well made,
"This is well made." But do not add, "Who made that?" If he himself says with a
proud and self-satisfied air, "I made it," add coldly, "You or another, it makes no
difference; in any event it is work well done."
Good mother, protect yourself above all against the lies which are prepared for
you. If your son knows many things, distrust everything he knows. If he has the
misfortune of being raised in Paris and of being rich, he is lost. So long as there
are skillful artists there, he will have all their talents; but far away from them,
he will no longer have any. In Paris the rich man knows everything; the only
ignoramus is the poor man. This capital is full of amateurs, especially among the
ladies, who produce their work as M. Guillaume contrived his colors.24 I know of
three honorable exceptions to this among men; there may be more. But I know of none
among women, and I doubt that there are any. In general, one gets a name in the
arts as in the law; one becomes an artist and judges artists as one becomes a
doctor of law and a magistrate.
If, therefore, it were once established that it is a fine thing to know a trade,
your children would soon know one without learning it. They would pass as masters
like the Councillors of Zurich.25 None of this ceremony for Emile—no appearance and
always reality. Let it not be said that he knows, but let him learn in silence. Let
him always produce his masterpiece and never pass for a master; he should prove
himself a worker not by his title but by his work.
If I have made myself understood up to now, one should conceive how I imperceptibly
give my pupil, with the habit of exercising his body and of manual labor, the taste
for reflection and meditation. This counterbalances in him the idleness which would
result from his indifference to men's judgments and from the calm of his passions.
He must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher so as not to be as lazy as
a savage. The great secret of education is to make the exercises of the body and
those of the mind always serve as relaxations from one another.
But let us avoid beginning too soon instruction which demands a riper spirit. Emile
will not be a worker for long without experiencing for himself the inequality of
conditions which he had at first only glimpsed. On the basis of the maxims I give
him—maxims which are within his reach—he will want to examine me in my turn. In
receiving everything from me alone, in seeing himself so close to the state of the
poor, he will want to know why I am so far from it. He will perhaps catch me
unprepared and ask ticklish questions. "You are rich, you told me so, and I see it.
A rich man also owes his work to society, since he is a man. But you, what do you
then do for it?" What would a fine governor say to that? I do not know. He would
perhaps be fool enough to speak
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to the child of the care he takes of him. As for me, the workshop gets me out of
it. "That is, dear Emile, an excellent question. I promise you to answer concerning
my case when you give an answer with which you are satisfied concerning your own
case. In the meantime I shall take care to give to you and the poor what surplus I
have and to produce a table or a bench every week so as not to be completely good
for nothing."
Now we have returned to ourselves. Now our child, ready to stop being a child, has
become aware of himself as an individual. Now he senses more than ever the
necessity which attaches him to things. After having begun by exercising his body
and his senses, we have exercised his mind and his judgment. Finally, we have
joined the use of his limbs to that of his faculties. We have made an active and
thinking being. It remains for us, in order to complete the man, only to make a
loving and feeling being—that is to say, to perfect reason by sentiment. But before
entering this new order of things, let us cast our eyes on the one we are leaving
and see as exactly as possible where we have gotten.
At first our pupil had only sensations. Now he has ideas. He only felt; now he
judges; for from the comparison of several successive or simultaneous sensations
and the judgment made of them is born a sort of mixed or complex sensation which I
call an idea.
The manner of forming ideas is what gives a character to the human mind. The mind
which forms its ideas only on the basis of real relations is a solid mind. The one
satisfied with apparent relations is a superficial mind. The one which sees
relations such as they are is a precise mind. The one which evaluates them poorly
is a defective mind. The one which makes up imaginary relations that have neither
reality nor appearance is mad. The one which does not compare at all is imbe-cilic.
The greater or lesser aptitude at comparing ideas and at finding relations is what
constitutes in men greater or lesser intelligence, etc.
Simple ideas are only compared sensations. There are judgments in simple sensations
as well as in the complex sensations which I call simple ideas. In sensation,
judgment is purely passive. It affirms that one feels what one feels. In perception
or idea, judgment is active. It brings together, compares, and determines relations
which the senses do not determine. This is the entire difference, but it is great.
Nature never deceives us. It is always we who deceive ourselves.
I see an eight-year-old child served ice cream. He brings the spoon to his mouth
without knowing what it is, and, surprised by the cold, shouts, "Oh, it's burning
me!" He experiences a very lively sensation. He knows of none livelier than the
heat of fire, and he believes he feels that one. However, he is mistaken. The chill
of the cold hurts him, but it does not burn him, and these two sensations are not
similar, since those who have experienced both do not confound them. It is not,
therefore, the sensation which deceives him but the judgment he makes about it.
It is the same for someone who sees a mirror or an optical gadget for the first
time, or who goes into a deep cellar in the heart of winter or summer, or who dips
a very hot or very cold hand in tepid water, or who rolls a little ball between two
crossed fingers, etc. If he is satisfied
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EMILE
with saying what he perceives, what he feels, with his judgment remaining purely
passive, it is impossible that he be deceived. But when he judges a thing by its
appearance, he is active, he compares, and he establishes by induction relations he
does not perceive; then he is deceived or can be deceived. To correct or prevent
the error, he needs experience.
Show your pupil at night clouds passing between him and the moon. He will believe
that it is the moon passing in the opposite direction and that the clouds are
stationary. He will believe it as a result of a hasty induction, because he
ordinarily sees little objects moving instead of large ones, and the clouds seem
larger to him than the moon, whose distance he cannot estimate. When he is in a
drifting boat and looks at the shore from a little way off, he falls into the
opposite error and believes he sees the land gliding by. Not sensing that he is in
motion, he regards the boat, the sea or the river, and his whole horizon as an
immobile whole, of which the shore he sees gliding by seems to him only a part.
The first time a child sees a stick dropped halfway in water, he sees a broken
stick. The sensation is true, and it would not fail to be so even if we did not
know the reason for this appearance. Therefore, if you ask him what he sees, he
says, "A broken stick"—and what he says is true, for it is quite certain he has the
sensation of a broken stick. But when, deceived by his judgment, he goes farther
and, after affirming that he sees a broken stick, he affirms in addition that what
he sees actually is a broken stick, then what he says is false. Why is that?
Because then he becomes active and no longer judges by inspection, but rather by
induction, in affirming what he does not sense—that is, that the judgment he
receives from one sense would be confirmed by another.
Since all our errors come from our judgments, it is clear that if we never needed
to judge, we would not need to learn. We would never be in a position to be
deceived. We would be happier with our ignorance than we can be with our knowledge.
Who denies that the learned know countless true things which the ignorant will
never know? Are the learned thereby closer to the truth? On the contrary, they get
farther from it in advancing; because the vanity of judging makes even more
progress than enlightenment does, each truth that they learn comes only with a
hundred false judgments. It is entirely evident that the learned companies of
Europe are only public schools of lies. And there are very certainly more errors in
the Academy of Sciences than in a whole nation of Hurons.
Since the more men know, the more they are deceived, the only means of avoiding
error is ignorance. Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken. That is the
lesson of nature as well as of reason. Beyond the immediate relations—very small in
number and very easily sensed —which things have to us, we naturally have only a
profound indifference toward all the rest. A savage would not take a step out of
his way to go and see the working of the finest machine and all the wonders of
electricity. "Of what importance is it to me?" is the phrase most familiar to the
ignorant man and most suitable for the wise one.
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But unhappily this phrase does not work for us anymore. Everything is important for
us, since we are dependent on everything; and our curiosity necessarily extends
with our needs. That is why I attribute very great curiosity to the philosopher and
none at all to the savage. The latter needs no one; the former needs everyone and
especially admirers.
I will be told that I abandon nature. I do not believe that at all. It chooses its
instruments and regulates them according to need, not to opinion. Now, needs change
according to the situation of men. There is a great difference between the natural
man living in the state of nature and the natural man living in the state of
society. Emile is not a savage to be relegated to the desert. He is a savage made
to inhabit cities. He has to know how to find his necessities in them, to take
advantage of their inhabitants, and to live, if not like them, at least with them.
Amidst so many new relations on which he is going to depend, he will, in spite of
himself, have to judge; let us teach him, therefore, to judge well.
The best way to teach someone to judge well is the one which tends to simplify our
experiences and even to make us able to omit them without falling into error. From
this it follows that after having for a long time verified the relations of one
sense by another, one still has to learn to verify the relations of each sense by
itself without need of recourse to another sense. Then each sensation will become
an idea for us, and this idea will always conform to the truth. This is the sort of
accomplishment with which I have tried to fill this third age of human life.
This way of proceeding demands a patience and a circumspection of which few masters
are capable, and without which the disciple will never learn to judge. If, for
example, he is deceived about the appearance of the broken stick, and to show him
his error you are in a hurry to pull the stick out of the water, you will perhaps
undeceive him. But what will you teach him? Nothing but what he would soon have
learned by himself. Oh, it is not that which has to be done! The goal is less to
teach him a truth than to show him how he must always go about discovering the
truth. In order to instruct him better, you must not undeceive him so soon. Let us
take Emile and me as an example.
In the first place, every child raised in the ordinary way will not fail to answer
affirmatively the second of the two questions posed above. "It is surely a broken
stick," he will say. I doubt very much that Emile would give me the same answer.
Not seeing the necessity of being learned, or of appearing to be, he is never in a
hurry to judge. He judges only on the basis of evidence, and he is far removed from
finding it on this occasion—he who knows how much our judgments about appearances
are subject to illusion, be it only the illusion of perspective.
Moreover, since he knows by experience that my most frivolous questions always have
some object that he does not perceive at first, he has not gotten the habit of
answering them lightly. On the contrary, he is distrustful of them. He is attentive
to them. He examines them with great care before responding to them. He never gives
me a response with which he himself is not satisfied, and he is difficult to sat-
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EMILE
isfy. Finally, we both pride ourselves not on knowing the truth of things but only
on not falling into error. We would be far more embarrassed at contenting ourselves
with a reason which is not good than at not finding one at all. "I don't know" is a
phrase which goes over so well with both of us and which we repeat so often that it
no longer costs either of us a thing. But whether he blurts out this lightheaded
answer or avoids it with our convenient "I don't know," my reply is the same,
"Let's see, let's examine it."
The stick, half dipped in water, is fixed in a perpendicular position. To know if
it is broken, as it appears to be, how many things must we do before drawing it
from the water or putting a hand to it?
i. First we walk all around the stick, and we see that the break turns as we do.
Therefore, it is our eye alone which changes it, and glances do not move bodies.
2. We look from straight above at the end of the stick which is out of the
water. Then the stick is no longer curved. The end near our eye exactly hides the
other end from us.20 Did our eye straighten out the stick?
3. We stir the water's surface. We see the stick fold up in many pieces, move
in zigzags, and follow the undulations of the water. Does the movement we give to
this water suffice to break, soften, and thus dissolve the stick?
4. We let the water flow out, and we see the stick straighten out little by
little as the water goes down. Is this not more than enough for clarifying the fact
and discovering refraction? Then it is not true that sight deceives us, since we
need nothing but it alone to rectify the errors we attribute to it.
Let us suppose that the child is stupid enough not to sense the result of these
experiences. It is then that touch must be called to the aid of sight. Instead of
pulling the stick out of the water, leave it in its position, and let the child run
his hand from one end to the other. He will not feel an angle. Therefore, the stick
is not broken.27
You will tell me that there are not only judgments here but formal reasonings. It-
is true. But do you not see that as soon as the mind has gotten as far as ideas,
every judgment is a reasoning? The consciousness of every sensation is a
proposition, a judgment. Therefore, as soon as one compares one sensation with
another, one reasons. The art of judging and the art of reasoning are exactly the
same.
I would prefer that Emile never know dioptrics if he cannot learn it around this
stick. He will not have dissected insects; he will not have counted the spots on
the sun. He will not know what a microscope and a telescope are. Your learned
pupils will make fun of his ignorance. They will not be wrong; for before he uses
these instruments, I intend him to invent them. And you may well suspect that this
will not come so soon.
This is the spirit of my whole method in this part. If the child rolls a little
ball between two crossed fingers and believes he feels two balls, I shall not
permit him to look at it before he is convinced there is only one.
These clarifications will suffice, I think, to show distinctly the prog-
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ress of my pupil's mind up to now and the route by which he made this progress. But
you are perhaps frightened off by the multitude of things I have caused to pass
before him. You are afraid that I am overwhelming his mind with this quantity of
knowledge. On the contrary, I teach him far more to be ignorant of these things
than to know them. I show him the route of science—easy, it is true, but long,
immense, slow to traverse. I make him take the first steps so that he recognizes
the way in, but I never permit him to go far.
Forced to learn by himself, he uses his reason and not another's; for to give
nothing to opinion, one must given nothing to authority, and most of our errors
come to us far less from ourselves than from others. From this constant exercise
there ought to result a vigor of mind similar to the vigor given to bodies by work
and fatigue. Another advantage is that one advances only in proportion to one's
strength. The mind, no less than the body, bears only what it can bear. When
understanding appropriates things before depositing them in memory, what it draws
from memory later belongs to it; whereas, by overburdening memory without the
participation of understanding, one runs the risk of never withdrawing anything
from memory suitable for understanding.
Emile has little knowledge, but what he has is truly his own. He knows nothing
halfway. Among the small number of things he knows and knows well, the most
important is that there are many things of which he is ignorant and which he can
know one day; there are many more that other men know that he will never know in
his life; and there are an infinite number of others that no man will ever know.
Emile has a mind that is universal not by its learning but by its faculty to
acquire learning; a mind that is open, intelligent, ready for everything, and, as
Montaigne says, if not instructed, at least able to be instructed.28 It is enough
for me that he knows how to find the "what's it good for?" in everything he does
and the "why?" in everything he believes. Once again, my object is not to give him
science but to teach him to acquire science when needed, to make him estimate it
for exactly what it is worth, and to make him love the truth above all. With this
method one advances little, but one never takes a useless step, and one is not
forced to go backward.
Emile has only natural and purely physical knowledge. He does not know even the
name of history, or what metaphysics and morals are. He knows the essential
relations of man to things but nothing of the moral relations of man to man. He
hardly knows how to generalize ideas and hardly how to make abstractions. He sees
common qualities in certain bodies without reasoning about these qualities in
themselves. He knows abstract extension with the aid of the figures of geometry,
and he knows abstract quantity with the aid of the signs of algebra. These figures
and these signs are the supports of the abstractions on which his senses rest. He
seeks to know things not by their nature but only by the relations which are
connected with his interest. He estimates what is foreign to him only in relation
to himself. But this estimation is exact and sure. Whim and convention count for
nothing in it. What is more useful to him, he takes more seriously; never deviat-ii
g from this way of evaluating, he grants nothing to opinion.
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EMILE
Emile is laborious, temperate, patient, firm, and full of courage. His imagination
is in no way inflamed and never enlarges dangers. He is sensitive to few ills, and
he knows constancy in endurance because he has not learned to quarrel with destiny.
With respect to death, he does not yet know well what it is; but since he is
accustomed to submitting to the law of necessity without resistance, when he has to
die, he will die without moaning and without struggling. This is all that nature
permits at this most abhorred of all moments. To live free and to depend little on
human things is the best means of learning how to die.
In a word, of virtue Emile has all that relates to himself. To have the social
virtues, too, he lacks only the knowledge of the relations which demand them; he
lacks only the learning which his mind is all ready to receive.
He considers himself without regard to others and finds it good that others do not
think of him. He demands nothing of anyone and believes he owes nothing to anyone.
He is alone in human society; he counts on himself alone. More than anyone else, he
has the right to count on himself, for he is all that one can be at his age. He has
no errors, or only those that are inevitable for us. He has no vices, or only those
against which no man can guarantee himself. He has a healthy body, agile limbs, a
precise and unprejudiced mind, a heart that is free and without passions. Amour-
propre, the first and most natural of all the passions, is still hardly aroused in
him. Without troubling the repose of anyone, he has lived satisfied, happy, and
free insofar as nature has permitted. Do you find that a child who has come in this
way to his fifteenth year has wasted the preceding ones?
End of the Third Book

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BOOK IV
IT
-M_ JL-OW RAPID is our journey on this earth! The first quarter of life has been
lived before one knows the use of it. The last quarter is lived when one has ceased
to enjoy it. At first we do not know how to live; soon we can no longer live; and
in the interval which separates these two useless extremities, three-quarters of
the time remaining to us is consumed by sleep, work, pain, constraint, and efforts
of all kinds. Life is short, not so much because it lasts a short time as because
we have almost none of that short time for savoring it. The moment of death may
well be distant from that of birth, but life is always too short when this space is
poorly filled.
We are, so to speak, born twice: once to exist and once to live; once for our
species and once for our sex. Those who regard women as an imperfect man are
doubtless wrong, but the external analogy is on their side. Up to the nubile age
children of the two sexes have nothing apparent to distinguish them: the same
visage, the same figure, the same complexion, the same voice. Everything is equal:
girls are children, boys are children; the same name suffices for beings so much
alike. Males whose ulterior sexual development is prevented maintain this
similarity their whole lives; they are always big children. And women, since they
never lose this same similarity, seem in many respects never to be anything else.
But man in general is not made to remain always in childhood. He leaves it at the
time prescribed by nature; and this moment of crisis, although rather short, has
far-reaching influences.
As the roaring of the sea precedes a tempest from afar, this stormy revolution is
proclaimed by the murmur of the nascent passions. A mute fermentation warns of
danger's approach. A change in humor, frequent anger, a mind in constant agitation,
makes the child almost unmanageable. He becomes deaf to the voice which made him
docile. His feverishness turns him into a lion. He disregards his guide; he no
longer wishes to be governed.
To the moral signs of a deteriorating humor are joined noticeable
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EMILE
changes in his looks. His face develops expression and takes on character. The
sparse and soft cotton growing on the lower part of his cheeks darkens and gains
consistency. His voice breaks or, rather, he loses it; he is neither child nor man
and can take the tone of neither. His eyes, those organs of the soul which have
said nothing up to now, find a language and acquire expressiveness. A nascent fire
animates them; their glances, more lively, still have a holy innocence, but they no
longer have their first imbecility. He senses already that they can say too much;
he begins to know how to lower them and to blush. He becomes sensitive before
knowing what he is sensing. He is uneasy without reason for being so. All this can
come slowly and still leave you time. But if his vivacity makes him too impatient;
if his anger changes into fury; if he is irritable and then tender from one moment
to the next; if he sheds tears without cause; if, when near objects which begin to
become dangerous for him, his pulse rises and his eye is inflamed; if the hand of a
woman placed on his makes him shiver; if he gets flustered or is intimidated near
her—Ulysses, O wise Ulysses, be careful. The goatskins you closed with so much care
are open. The winds are already loose. No longer leave the tiller for an instant,
or all is lost.1
This is the second birth of which I have spoken. It is now that man is truly born
to life and now that nothing human is foreign to him. Up to now our care has only
been a child's game. It takes on true importance only at present. This period, when
ordinary educations end, is properly the one when ours ought to begin. But to
present this new plan well, let us treat more fundamentally the state of the things
which relate to it.
Our passions are the principal instruments of our preservation. It is, therefore,
an enterprise as vain as it is ridiculous to want to destroy them—it is to control
nature, it is to reform the work of God. If God were to tell men to annihilate the
passions which He gives him, God would will and not will; He would contradict
Himself. Never did He give this senseless order. Nothing of the kind is written in
the human heart. And what God wants a man to do, He does not have told to him by
another man. He tells it to him Himself; He writes it in the depths of his heart.
I would find someone who wanted to prevent the birth of the passions almost as mad
as someone who wanted to annihilate them; and those who believed that this was my
project up to now would surely have understood me very badly.
But would it be reasoning well to conclude, from the fact that it is in man's
nature to have passions, that all the passions that we feel in ourselves and see in
others are natural? Their source is natural, it is true. But countless alien
streams have swollen it. It is a great river which constantly grows and in which
one could hardly find a few drops of its first waters. Our natural passions are
very limited. They are the instruments of our freedom; they tend to preserve us.
All those which subject us and destroy us come from elsewhere. Nature does not give
them to us. We appropriate them to the detriment of nature.
The source of our passions, the origin and the principle of all the others, the
only one born with man and which never leaves him so long
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BOOK IV
as he lives is self-love—a primitive, innate passion, which is anterior to every
other, and of which all others are in a sense only modifications. In this sense, if
you wish, all passions are natural. But most of these modifications have alien
causes without which they would never have come to pass; and these same
modifications, far from being advantageous for us, are harmful. They alter the
primary goal and are at odds with their own principle. It is then that man finds
himself outside of nature and sets himself in contradiction with himself.
The love of oneself is always good and always in conformity with order. Since each
man is specially entrusted with his own preservation, the first and most important
of his cares is and ought to be to watch over it constantly. And how could he watch
over it if he did not take the greatest interest in it?
Therefore, we have to love ourselves to preserve ourselves; and it follows
immediately from the same sentiment that we love what preserves us. Every child is
attached to his nurse. Romulus must have been attached to the wolf that suckled
him. At first this attachment is purely mechanical. What fosters the well-being of
an individual attracts him; what harms him repels him. This is merely a blind
instinct. What transforms this instinct into sentiment, attachment into love,
aversion into hate, is the intention manifested to harm us or to be useful to us.
One is never passionate about insensible beings which merely follow the impulsion
given to them. But those from whom one expects good or ill by their inner
disposition, by their will—those we see acting freely for us or against us—inspire
in us sentiments similar to those they manifest toward us. We seek what serves us,
but we love what wants to serve us. We flee what harms us, but we hate what wants
to harm us.
A child's first sentiment is to love himself; and the second, which derives from
the first, is to love those who come near him, for in the state of weakness that he
is in, he does not recognize anyone except by the assistance and care he receives.
At first the attachment he has for his nurse and his governess is only habit. He
seeks them because he needs them and is well off in having them; it is recognition
rather than benevolence. He needs much time to understand that not only are they
useful to him but they want to be; and it is then that he begins to love them.
A child is therefore naturally inclined to benevolence, because he sees that
everything approaching him is inclined to assist him; and from this observation he
gets the habit of a sentiment favorable to his species. But as he extends his
relations, his needs, and his active or passive dependencies, the sentiment of his
connections with others is awakened and produces the sentiment of duties and
preferences. Then the child becomes imperious, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive.
If he is bent to obedience, he does not see the utility of what he is ordered, and
he attributes it to caprice, to the intention of tormenting him; and he revolts. If
he is obeyed, as soon as something resists him, he sees in it a rebellion, an
intention to resist him. He beats the chair or the table for having disobeyed him.
Self-love, which regards only ourselves, is contented when our true needs are
satisfied. But amour-propre, which makes comparisons, is never content and never
could
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EMILE
be, because this sentiment, preferring ourselves to others, also demands others to
prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. This is how the gentle and
affectionate passions are born of self-love, and how the hateful and irascible
passions are born of amour-propre. Thus what makes man essentially good is to have
few needs and to compare himself little to others; what makes him essentially
wicked is to have many needs and to depend very much on opinion. On the basis of
this principle it is easy to see how all the passions of children and men can be
directed to good or bad. It is true that since they are nbt able always to live
alone, it will be difficult for them always to be good. This same difficulty will
necessarily increase with their relations; and this, above all, is why the dangers
of society make art and care all the more indispensable for us to forestall in the
human heart the depravity born of their new needs.
The study suitable for man is that of his relations. So long as he knows himself
only in his physical being, he ought to study himself in his relations with things.
This is the job of his childhood. When he begins to sense his moral being, he ought
to study himself in his relations with men. This is the job of his whole life,
beginning from the point we have now reached.-
As soon as man has need of a companion, he is no longer an isolated being. His
heart is no longer alone. All his relations with his species, all the affections of
his soul are born with this one. His first passion soon makes the others ferment.
The inclination of instinct is indeterminate. One sex is attracted to the other;
that is the movement of nature. Choice, preferences, and personal attachments are
the work of enlightenment, prejudice, and habit. Time and knowledge are required to
make us capable of love. One loves only after having judged; one prefers only after
having compared. These judgments are made without one's being aware of it, but they
are nonetheless real. True love, whatever is said of it, will always be honored by
men; for although its transports lead us astray, although it does not exclude
odious qualities from the heart that feels it—and even produces them—it
nevertheless always presupposes estimable qualities without which one would not be
in a condition to feel it. This choosing, which is held to be the opposite of
reason, comes to us from it. Love has been presented as blind because it has better
eyes than we do and sees relations we are not able to perceive. For a man who had
no idea of merit or beauty, every woman would be equally good, and the first comer
would always be the most lovable. Far from arising from nature, love is the rule
and the bridle of nature's inclinations. It is due to love that, except for the
beloved object, one sex ceases to be anything for the other.
One wants to obtain the preference that one grants. Love must be reciprocal. To be
loved, one has to make oneself lovable. To be preferred, one has to make oneself
more lovable than another, more lovable than every other, at least in the eyes of
the beloved object. This is the source of the first glances at one's fellows; this
is the source of the first comparisons with them; this is the source of emulation,
rivalries, and jealousy. A heart full of an overflowing sentiment likes
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BOOK IV
to open itself. From the need for a mistress is soon born the need for a friend. He
who senses how sweet it is to be loved would want to be loved by everyone; and all
could not want preference without there being many malcontents. With love and
friendship are born dissensions, enmity, and hate. From the bosom of so many
diverse passions I see opinion raising an unshakable throne, and stupid mortals,
subjected to its empire, basing their own existence on the judgments of others.
Extend these ideas, and you will see where our amour-propre gets the form we
believe natural to it, and how self-love, ceasing to be an absolute sentiment,
becomes pride in great souls, vanity in small ones, and feeds itself constantly in
all at the expense of their neighbors. This species of passion, not having its germ
in children's hearts, cannot be born in them of itself; it is we alone who put it
there, and it never takes root except by our fault. But this is no longer the case
with the young man's heart. Whatever we may do, these passions will be born in
spite of us. It is therefore time to change method.
Let us begin with some important reflections on the critical state we are dealing
with here. The transition from childhood to puberty is not so determined by nature
that it does not vary in individuals according to their temperaments and in peoples
according to their climates. Everyone knows the distinction observable in this
regard between hot and cold countries; and each of us sees that ardent temperaments
are formed sooner than others. But one can be deceived as to the causes and can
often attribute to physical causes what must be imputed to moral ones. This is one
of the most frequent abuses committed by the philosophy of our age. Nature's
instruction is late and slow; men's is almost always premature. In the former case
the senses wake the imagination; in the latter the imagination wakes the senses; it
gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate and weaken
individuals first and in the long run the species itself. An observation more
general and more certain than that of the effect of climates is that puberty and
sexual potency always arrive earlier in learned and civilized peoples than in
ignorant and barbarous peoples.* Children have a singular sagacity in discerning
the bad morals covered over by all the apish posturings of propriety. The purified
language dictated to them, the lessons of decency given to them, the veil of
mystery that is supposed to be drawn over their eyes, are only so many spurs to
their curiosity. From the way this is gone about it is clear that
* "In the cities," says M. de Buffon, "and among the well-to-do, accustomed to
abundant and succulent foods, children come to this state sooner. In the country
and among poor people the children are slower because they are badly and too little
fed. They need two or three years more." [Histoire naturelle, vol. IV, p. 238.] I
accept the observation but not the explanation, since in countries where villagers
are very well fed and eat a lot, as in the Valois, and even in certain mountainous
cantons of Italy, like Friuli, the age of puberty in the two sexes is also later
than in the bosom of cities where, to satisfy vanity, an extreme parsimony governs
spending on food and where most people have, as the proverb says, "velvet robes and
stomachs filled with bran." One is surprised in these mountains to see big boys, as
strong as men, who still have high voices and beardless chins, and big girls,
otherwise quite developed, who do not have the periodic sign of their sex. This
difference appears to me to come solely from the fact that, due to the simplicity
of their morals, their imagination, peaceful and calm for a longer time, causes
their blood to ferment later and makes their temperament less precocious.
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EMILE
the pretense of hiding something from them serves only to teach them about it; of
all the instruction given them, this is the one of which they take most advantage.
Consult experience. You will understand to what extent this senseless method
accelerates nature's work and ruins the temperament. This is one of the principal
causes of the degeneracy of the races in cities. The young people, exhausted early,
remain small, weak, and ill-formed; they age instead of growing, as the vine that
has been made to bear fruit in the spring languishes and dies before autumn.
It is necessary to have lived among coarse and simple peoples to know up to what
age a happy ignorance can prolong the innocence of children there. It is a
spectacle that is at the same time touching and laughable to see the two sexes,
abandoned to the security of their hearts, prolong in the flower of age and beauty
the naive games of childhood and show by their very familiarity the purity of their
pleasures. When finally these amiable young people come to marriage, the two
spouses give each other the first fruits of their persons and are thereby dearer to
one another. Multitudes of healthy and robust children become the pledges of an
incorruptible union and the fruit of the prudence of their parents' early years.
If the age at which man acquires knowledge of his sex differs as much due to the
effect of education as to the action of nature, it follows that this age can be
accelerated or retarded according to the way in which children are raised; and if
the body gains or loses consistency to the extent that this progress is retarded or
accelerated, it follows again that the greater the effort made to retard it, the
more a young man acquires vigor and force. I am still speaking only of purely
physical effects. It will soon be seen that the effects are not limited to these.
From these reflections I draw the solution to the question so often debated—whether
it is fitting to enlighten children early concerning the objects of their
curiosity, or whether it is better to put them off the trail with little
falsehoods? I think one ought to do neither the one nor the other. In the first
place, this curiosity does not come to them without someone's having provided the
occasion for it. One must therefore act in such a way that they do not have such
curiosity. In the second place, questions one is not forced to answer do not
require deceiving the child who asks them. It is better to impose silence on him
than to answer him by lying. He will be little surprised by this law if care has
been taken to subject him to it in inconsequential things. Finally, if one decides
to answer, let it be with the greatest simplicity, without mystery, without
embarrassment, without a smile. There is much less danger in satisfying the child's
curiosity than there is in exciting it.
Let your responses always be solemn, short, and firm, without ever appearing to
hesitate. I do not need to add that they ought to be true. One cannot teach
children the danger of lying to men without being aware of the greater danger, on
the part of men, of lying to children. A single proved lie told by the master to
the child would ruin forever the whole fruit of the education.
An absolute ignorance concerning certain matters is perhaps what
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BOOK IV
would best suit children. But let them learn early what is impossible to hide from
them always. Either their curiosity must not be aroused in any way, or it must be
satisfied before the age at which it is no longer without danger. Your conduct with
your pupil in this respect depends a great deal on his particular situation, the
societies which surround him, the circumstances in which it is expected that he
might find himself, etc. It is important here to leave nothing to chance; and if
you are not sure of keeping him ignorant of the difference between the sexes until
he is sixteen, take care that he learn it before he is ten.
I do not like it when too pure a language is affected with children or when long
detours, which they notice, are made to avoid giving things their true names. Good
morals in these matters always contain much simplicity, but imaginations soiled by
vice make the ear delicate and force a constant refinement of expression. Coarse
terms are inconsequential; it is lascivious ideas which must be kept away.
Although modesty is natural to the human species, naturally children have none.
Modesty is born only with the knowledge of evil, and how could children, who do not
and should not have this knowledge, have the sentiment which is its effect? To give
them lessons in modesty and decency is to teach them that there are shameful and
indecent things. It is to give them a secret desire to know those things. Sooner or
later they succeed, and the first spark which touches the imagination inevitably
accelerates the inflammation of the senses. Whoever blushes is already guilty. True
innocence is ashamed of nothing.
Children do not have the same desires as men; but since they are just as subject to
uncleanness offensive to the senses, they can from that very subjection get the
same lessons in propriety. Follow the spirit of nature which, by putting in the
same place the organs of the secret pleasures and those of the disgusting needs,
inspires in us the same cares at different ages, now due to one idea, then due to
another; in the man due to modesty, in the child due to cleanliness.
I see only one good means of preserving children in their innocence; it is for all
those who surround them to respect and to love it. Without that, all the restraint
one tries to use with them is sooner or later belied. A smile, a wink, a careless
gesture, tells them everything one seeks to hide from them. To learn it, they need
only see that one wanted to hide it from them. The delicacy of the turns of phrase
and of the expressions which polite people use with one another is completely
misplaced in relation to children since it assumes an enlightenment they ought not
to have; but when one truly honors their simplicity, one easily takes on, in
speaking to them, the simplicity of the terms whifch suit them. There is a certain
naivete of language which fits and pleases innocence. This is the true tone which
turns a child away from a dangerous curiosity. In speaking simply to him about
everything, one does not let him suspect that anything remains to be told him. In
joining to coarse words the displeasing ideas suitable to them, the first fire of
imagination is smothered. He is not forbidden to pronounce these words and to have
these ideas; but without his being aware of it, he is made to have a repugnance
against recalling them. And how much embarrassment this naive freedom spares those
who, drawing such freedom from
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EMILE
their own hearts, always say what should be said and always say just what they
feel!
"Where do children come from?" An embarrassing question which comes naturally
enough to children, and to which an indiscreet or a prudent answer is sometimes
decisive for their morals and their health for their whole lives. The most
expeditious way that a mother can imagine for putting it off without deceiving her
son is to impose silence on him. That would be good if one had accustomed him to it
for a long time in regard to unimportant questions and he did not suspect mysteries
in this new tone. But rarely does she leave it at that. "That's the secret of
married people," she will tell him. "Little boys shouldn't be so curious." This is
very good for getting the mother out of trouble. But she should know that the
little boy, stung by this contemptuous air, will not have a moment's rest before he
has learned the secret of married people, and that he will not be long in learning
it.
Permit me to report a very different answer which I heard given to the same
question, one which was all the more striking as it came from a woman as modest in
her speech as in her manners. When necessary, however, she knew how to trample on
the false fear of blame and the vain remarks of mockers for the sake of virtue and
her son's good. Not long before the child had passed in his urine a little stone
which had torn his urethera but had been forgotten when the illness passed. "Mama,"
said the giddy little fellow, "where do children come from?" "My child," answered
the mother without hesitation, "women piss them out with pains which sometimes cost
them their lives." Let madmen laugh and fools be scandalized; but let the wise
consider whether they can ever find a more judicious answer or one that better
achieves its purposes.
In the first place, the idea of a need which is natural and known to the child
turns aside that of a mysterious process. The accessory ideas of pain and death
cover this process with a veil of sadness which deadens the imagination and
represses curiosity. Everything turns the mind toward the consequences of the
delivery and not toward its causes. The infirmities of human nature, distasteful
objects, images of suffering—these are the clarifications to which this answer
leads, if the repugnance it inspires permits the child to ask for them. How will
the restlessness of the desires be awakened in conversations thus directed? And,
nevertheless, you see that the truth has not been adulterated and there was no need
to take advantage of one's pupil instead of instructing him.
Your children read. From their reading they get knowledge they would not have if
they had not read. If they study, the imagination catches fire and intensifies in
the silence of their rooms. If they live in society, they hear odd talk; they see
things that strike them. They have been well persuaded that they are men;
therefore, whatever men do in their presence serves as the occasion for them to
investigate how it applies to them. The actions of others must surely serve as
models for them when the judgments of others serve as laws for them. The domestics
who are made dependent on them, and are consequently interested in pleasing them,
pay their court to them at the expense of
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good morals. Laughing governesses make remarks to them at four which the most
brazen women would not dare to make to them at fifteen. Soon the governesses forget
what they said, but the children do not forget what they heard. Naughty
conversations prepare the way for libertine morals. The rascally lackey debauches
the child, and the latter's secret acts as a guarantee for the former's.
The child raised according to his age is alone. He knows no attachments other than
those of habit. He loves his sister as he loves his watch, and his friend as his
dog. He does not feel himself to be of any sex, of any species. Man and woman are
equally alien to him. He does not consider anything they do or say to be related to
himself. He neither sees nor hears nor pays any attention to it. Their speeches
interest him no more than do the examples they set. All of that is unsuitable for
him. It is not an artful untruth which is imparted to him by this method; it is
nature's ignorance. The time is coming when this same nature takes care to
enlighten its pupil; and it is only then that it has put him in a condition to
profit without risk from the lessons it gives him. This is the principle. The
detailed rules do not belong to my subject, and the means I propose with a view to
other goals serve also as examples for this one.
Do you wish to put order and regularity in the nascent passions? Extend the period
during which they develop in order that they have the time to be arranged as they
are born. Then it is not man who orders them; it is nature itself. Your care is
only to let it arrange its work. If your pupil were alone, you would have nothing
to do. But everything surrounding him influences his imagination. The torrent of
prejudices carries him away. To restrain him, he must be pushed in the opposite
direction. Sentiment must enchain imagination, and reason silence the opinion of
men. The source of all the passions is sensibility; imagination determines their
bent. Every being who has a sense of his relations ought to be affected when these
relations are altered, and he imagines, or believes he imagines, others more
suitable to his nature. It is the errors of imagination which transform into vices
the passions of all limited beings—even those of angels, if they have any,3 for
they would have to know the nature of all beings in order to know what relations
best suit their nature.
This is, then, the summary of the whole of human wisdom in the use of the passions:
(i) To have a sense of the true relations of man, with respect to the species as
well as the individual. (2) To order all the affections of the soul according to
these relations.
But is man the master of ordering his affections according to this or that
relation? Without a doubt, if he is master of directing his imagination toward this
or that object or of giving it this or that habit. Besides, the issue here is less
what a man can do for himself than what we can do for our pupil by the choice of
circumstances in which we put him. To set forth the proper means for keeping him in
the order of nature is to say enough about how he can depart from it.
So long as his sensibility remains limited to his own individuality, there is
nothing moral in his actions. It is only when it begins to extend outside of
himself that it takes on, first, the sentiments and, then, the
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notions of good and evil which truly constitute him as a man and an integral part
of his species. It is on this first point, then, that we must initially fix our
observations.
These observations are difficult because, in order to make them, we must reject the
examples which are before our eyes and seek for those in which the successive
developments take place according to the order of nature.
A mannered, polite, civilized child, who only awaits the power of putting to work
the premature instructions he has received, is never mistaken as to the moment when
this power has come to him. Far from waiting for it, he accelerates it. He gives a
precocious fermentation to his blood. He knows what the object of his desires ought
to be long before he even experiences them. It is not nature which excites him; it
is he who forces nature. It has nothing more to teach him in making him a man. He
was one in thought a long time before being one in fact.
The true course of nature is more gradual and slower. Little by little the blood is
inflamed, the spirits are produced, the temperament is formed. The wise worker who
directs the manufacture takes care to perfect all his instruments before putting
them to work. A long restlessness precedes the first desires; a long ignorance puts
them off the track. One desires without knowing what. The blood ferments and is
agitated; a superabundance of life seeks to extend itself outward. The eye becomes
animated and looks over other beings. One begins to take an interest in those
surrounding us; one begins to feel that one is not made to live alone. It is thus
that the heart is opened to the human affections and becomes capable of attachment.
The first sentiment of which a carefully raised young man is capable is not love;
it is friendship. The first act of his nascent imagination is to teach him that he
has fellows; and the species affects him before the female sex. Here is another
advantage of prolonged innocence— that of profiting from nascent sensibility to sow
in the young adolescent's heart the first seeds of humanity. This advantage is all
the more precious since now is the only time of life when the same attentions can
have a true success.
I have always seen that young people who are corrupted early and given over to
women and debauchery are inhuman and cruel. The heat of their temperaments made
them impatient, vindictive, and wild. Their imaginations, filled by a single
object, rejected all the rest. They knew neither pity nor mercy. They would have
sacrificed fathers, mothers, and the whole universe to the least of their
pleasures. On the contrary, a young man raised in a happy simplicity is drawn by
the first movements of nature toward the tender and affectionate passions. His
compassionate heart is moved by the sufferings of his fellows. He has a thrill of
satisfaction at seeing his comrade again; his arms know how to find caressing
embraces; his eyes know how to shed tears of tenderness. He is sensitive to the
shame of displeasing, to the regret of having offended. If the ardor of his
inflamed blood makes him too intense, easily carried away, and angered, a moment
later all the goodness of
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his heart is seen in the effusion of his repentance. He cries, he moans about the
wound he has inflicted. He would want to redeem the blood he has shed with his own.
All of his fury is extinguished, all of his pride humiliated before the sentiment
of his wrong. Is he offended himself? At the height of his fury, an excuse, a word
disarms him. He pardons the injuries of others as gladly as he makes amends for his
own. Adolescence is not the age of vengeance or of hate; it is that of
commiseration, clemency, and generosity. Yes, I maintain, and I do not fear being
contradicted by experience, that a child who is not ill born, and who has preserved
his innocence until he is twenty, is at that age the most generous, the best, the
most loving and lovable of men. You have never been told anything of the kind. I
can well believe it. Your philosophers, raised in all the corruption of the
colleges, make no effort to learn this.
It is man's weakness which makes him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn
our hearts to humanity; we would owe humanity nothing if we were not men. Every
attachment is a sign of insufficiency. If each of us had no need of others, he
would hardly think of uniting himself with them. Thus from our very infirmity is
born our frail happiness. A truly happy being is a solitary being. God alone enjoys
an absolute happiness. But who among us has the idea of it? If some imperfect being
could suffice unto himself, what would he enjoy according to us? He would be alone;
he would be miserable. I do not conceive how someone who needs nothing can love
anything. I do not conceive how someone who loves nothing can be happy.
It follows from this that we are attached to our fellows less by the sentiment of
their pleasures than by the sentiment of their pains, for we see far better in the
latter the identity of our natures with theirs and the guarantees of their
attachment to us. If our common needs unite us by interest, our common miseries
unite us by affection. The sight of a happy man inspires in others less love than
envy. They would gladly accuse him of usurping a right he does not have in giving
himself an exclusive happiness; and amour-propre suffers, too, in making us feel
that this man has no need of us. But who does not pity the unhappy man whom he sees
suffering? Who would not want to deliver him from his ills if it only cost a wish
for that? Imagination puts us in the place of the miserable man rather than in that
of the happy man. We feel that one of these conditions touches us more closely than
the other. Pity is sweet because, in putting ourselves in the place of the one who
suffers, we nevertheless feel the pleasure of not suffering as he does. Envy is
bitter because the sight of a happy man, far from putting the envious man in his
place, makes the envious man regret not being there. It seems that the one exempts
us from the ills he suffers, and the other takes from us the goods he enjoys.
Do you wish, then, to excite and nourish in the heart of a young man the first
movements of nascent sensibility and turn his character toward beneficence and
goodness? Do not put the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy in him by the deceptive
image of the happiness of men. Do not expose his eyes at the outset to the pomp of
courts, the splendor of
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palaces, or the appeal of the theater. Do not take him to the circles of the great,
to brilliant assemblies. Show him the exterior of high society only after having
put him in a condition to evaluate it in itself. To show him the world before he
knows men is not to form him, it is to corrupt him; it is not to instruct him, it
is to deceive him.
Men are not naturally kings, or lords, or courtiers, or rich men. All are born
naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs,
and pains of every kind. Finally, all are condemned to death. This is what truly
belongs to man. This is what no mortal is exempt from. Begin, therefore, by
studying in human nature what is most inseparable from it, what best characterizes
humanity.
At sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he has himself suffered.
But he hardly knows that other beings suffer too. To see it without feeling it is
not to know it; and as I have said a hundred times, the child, not imagining what
others feel, knows only his own ills. But when the first development of his senses
lights the fire of imagination, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be
moved by their complaints and to suffer from their pains. It is then that the sad
picture of suffering humanity ought to bring to his heart the first tenderness it
has ever experienced.
If this moment is not easy to notice in your children, whom do you blame for it?
You instruct them so early in playing at sentiment; you teach them its language so
soon that, speaking always with the same accent, they turn your lessons against you
and leave you no way of distinguishing when they cease to lie and begin to feel
what they say. But look at my Emile. At the age to which I have brought him he has
neither felt nor lied. Before knowing what it is to love, he has said, "I love
you," to no one. The countenance he ought to put on when he goes into the room of
his sick father, mother, or governor has not been prescribed to him. He has not
been showed the art of affecting sadness he does not feel. He has not feigned tears
at the death of anyone, for he does not know what dying is. The same insensibility
he has in his heart is also in his manners. Indifferent to everything outside of
himself like all other children, he takes an interest in no one. All that
distinguishes him is his not caring to appear interested and his not being false
like them.
Emile, having reflected little on sensitive beings, will know late what it is to
suffer and die. He will begin to have gut reactions at the sounds of complaints and
cries, the sight of blood flowing will make him avert his eyes; the convulsions of
a dying animal will cause him an ineffable distress before he knows whence come
these new movements within him. If he had remained stupid and barbaric, he would
not have them; if he were more learned, he would know their source. He has already
compared too many ideas to feel nothing and not enough to have a conception of what
he feels.
Thus is born pity, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart
according to the order of nature. To become sensitive and pitying, the child must
know that there are beings like him who suffer what he has suffered, who feel the
pains he has felt, and that there are others whom he ought to conceive of as able
to feel them too. In
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fact, how do we let ourselves be moved by pity if not by transporting ourselves
outside of ourselves and identifying with the suffering animal, by leaving, as it
were, our own being to take on its being? We suffer only so much as we judge that
it suffers. It is not in ourselves, it is in him that we suffer. Thus, no one
becomes sensitive until his imagination is animated and begins to transport him out
of himself.
To excite and nourish this nascent sensibility, to guide it or follow it in its
natural inclination, what is there to do other than to offer the young man objects
on which the expansive force of his heart can act— objects which swell the heart,
which extend it to other beings, which make it find itself everywhere outside of
itself—and carefully to keep away those which contract and concentrate the heart
and tighten the spring of the human I? That is, to say it in other terms, to excite
in him goodness, humanity, commiseration, beneficence, and all the attractive and
sweet passions naturally pleasing to men, and to prevent the birth of envy,
covetousness, hate, and all the repulsive and cruel passions which make
sensibility, so to speak, not only nothing but negative and torment the man who
experiences them.
I believe I can summarize all the preceding reflections in two or three maxims
which are precise, clear, and easy to grasp.
First Maxim
It is not in the human heart to put ourselves in the place of people who are
happier than we, but only in that of those who are more pitiable.
If one finds exceptions to this maxim they are more apparent than real. Thus one
does not put oneself in the place of the rich or noble man to whom one is attached.
Even in attaching oneself sincerely, one is only appropriating a part of his well-
being. Sometimes one loves him in his misfortunes; but so long as he prospers, he
has as a true friend only that man who is not the dupe of appearances, and who
pities him more than he envies him, in spite of his prosperity.4
We are touched by the happiness of certain conditions—for example, of the rustic
and pastoral life. The charm of seeing those good people happy is not poisoned by
envy; we are truly interested in them. Why is this? Because we feel that we are the
masters of descending to this condition of peace and innocence and of enjoying the
same felicity. It is a resource for a rainy day which causes only agreeable ideas,
since in order to be able to make use of it, it suffices to want to do so. There is
always pleasure in seeing our resources, in contemplating our own goods, even when
we do not wish to make use of them.
It follows, therefore, that, in order to incline a young man to humanity, far from
making him admire the brilliant lot of others, one must show him the sad sides of
that lot, one must make him fear it. Then, by an evident inference, he ought to cut
out his own road to happiness, following in no one else's tracks.
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Second Maxim
One pities in others only those ills from which one does not feel oneself exempt.
Non ignora mali, miseris succurrere disco/'
I know nothing so beautiful, so profound, so touching, so true as this verse.
Why are kings without pity for their subjects? Because they count on never being
mere men. Why are the rich so hard toward the poor? It is because they have no fear
of becoming poor. Why does the nobility have so great a contempt for the people? It
is because a noble will never be a commoner. Why are the Turks generally more
humane and more hospitable than we are? It is because, with their totally arbitrary
government, which renders the greatness and the fortune of individuals always
precarious and unsteady, they do not regard abasement and poverty as a condition
alien to them.* Each may be tomorrow what the one whom he helps is today. This
reflection, which comes up constantly in Oriental stories, gives them a certain
touching quality that all the affectation of our dry moralizing totally lacks.6
Do not, therefore, accustom your pupil to regard the sufferings of the unfortunate
and the labors of the poor from the height of his glory; and do not hope to teach
him to pity them if he considers them alien to him. Make him understand well that
the fate of these unhappy men can be his, that all their ills are there in the
ground beneath his feet, that countless unforeseen and inevitable events can plunge
him into them from one moment to the next. Teach him to count on neither birth nor
health nor riches. Show him all the vicissitudes of fortune. Seek out for him
examples, always too frequent, of people who, from a station higher than his, have
fallen beneath these unhappy men. Whether it is their fault is not now the
question. Does he even know what fault is? Never violate the order of his
knowledge, and enlighten him only with explanations within his reach. He does not
need to be very knowledgeable to sense that all of human prudence is incapable of
assuring him whether in an hour he will be living or dying; whether the pain of
nephritis will not make him grit his teeth before nightfall; whether in a month he
will be rich or poor; whether within a year perhaps he will not be rowing under the
lash in the galleys of Algiers. Above all, do not go and tell him all this coldly
like his catechism. Let him see, let him feel the human calamities. Unsettle and
frighten his imagination with the perils by which every man is constantly
surrounded. Let him see around him all these abysses and, hearing you describe
them, hold on to you for fear of falling into them. We shall make him timid and
cowardly, you will say. We shall see in what follows, but for now let us begin by
making him humane. That, above all, is what is important for us?
* This appears to be changing a bit now. The conditions seem to become more fixed;
and thus the men become harder.
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Third Maxim
The pity one has for another's misfortune is measured not by the quantity of that
misfortune but by the sentiment which one attributes to those who suffer it.
One pities an unhappy man only to the extent one believes he is pitiable. The
physical sentiment of our ills is more limited than it seems. But it is by means of
memory, which makes us feel their continuity, and of imagination, which extends
them into the future, that they make us truly pitiable. This, I think, is one of
the causes which hardens us more to the ills of animals than to those of men,
although the common sensibility ought to make us identify with them equally. One
hardly pities a cart horse in his stable because one does not presume that the
horse, while eating his hay, thinks of the blows he has received and of the
fatigues awaiting him. Neither does one pity a sheep one sees grazing, although one
knows it will soon be slaughtered, because one judges that it does not foresee its
fate. By analogy one is similarly hardened against the fate of men, and the rich
are consoled about the ill they do to the poor, because they assume the latter to
be stupid enough to feel nothing of it. In general, I judge the value each sets on
the happiness of his fellows by the importance he appears to give them. It is
natural that one consider cheap the happiness of people one despises. Do not be
surprised, therefore, if political men speak of the people with so much disdain, or
if most of the philosophers affect to make man so wicked.
It is the people who compose humankind. What is not the people is so slight a thing
as not to be worth counting. Man is the same in all stations. If that is so, the
stations having the most members merit the most respect. To the man who thinks, all
the civil distinctions disappear. He sees the same passions, the same sentiments in
the hod-carrier and the illustrious man. He discerns there only a difference in
language, only a more or less affected tone; and if some essential difference
distinguishes them, it is to the disadvantage of those who dissemble more. The
people show themselves such as they are, and they are not lovable. But society
people have to be disguised. If they were to show themselves such as they are, they
would be disgusting.
There is, our wise men also say, the same proportion of happiness and misery in
every station—a maxim as deadly as it is untenable. If all are equally happy, what
need have I to put myself out for anyone? Let each remain as he is. Let the slave
be mistreated. Let the infirm suffer. Let the beggar perish. There is no gain for
them in changing stations. These wise men enumerate the miseries of the rich and
show the inanity of their vain pleasures. What a crude sophism! The miseries of the
rich man come to him not from his station but from himself alone, because he abuses
his station. Were he unhappier than the poor man himself, he would not be pitiable,
because his ills are all his own doing, and whether he is happy depends only on
himself. But the misery of the poor man comes to him from things, from the rigor of
his lot, which weighs down on him. No habit can take from him the physical
sentiments of fatigue, exhaustion, and hunger. Neither intelli-
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gence nor wisdom serves in any way to exempt him from the ills of his station. What
does Epictetus gain in foreseeing that his master is going to break his leg? Does
the master break Epictetus' leg any the less for that? He has, in addition to his
misfortune, the misfortune of foresight.7 If the people were as clever as we assume
them to be stupid, what could they be other than what they are? What could they do
other than what they do? Study persons of this order. You will see that although
their language is different, they have as much wit and more good sense than you do.
Respect your species. Be aware that it is composed essentially of a collection of
peoples; that if all the kings and all the philosophers were taken away, their
absence would hardly be noticeable; and that things would not be any the worse. In
a word, teach your pupil to love all men, even those who despise men. Do things in
such a way that he puts himself in no class but finds his bearings in all. Speak
before him of humankind with tenderness, even with pity, but never with contempt.
Man, do not dishonor man!
It is by these roads and other similar ones—quite contrary to those commonly taken—
that it is fitting to penetrate the heart of a young adolescent in order to arouse
the first emotions of nature and to develop his heart and extend it to his fellows.
To this I add that it is important to mix the least possible personal interest with
these emotions—above all, no vanity, no emulation, no glory, none of those
sentiments that force us to compare ourselves with others, for these comparisons
are never made without some impression of hatred against those who dispute with us
for preference, even if only preference in our own esteem. Then one must become
blind or get angry, be wicked or stupid. Let us try to avoid being faced with this
choice. These dangerous passions will, I am told, be born sooner or later in spite
of us. I do not deny it. Everything has its time and its place. I only say that one
ought not to assist their birth.
This is the spirit of the method which must be prescribed. Here examples and
details are useless because the almost infinite division of characters begins at
this point, and each example I might give would perhaps not be suitable for even
one in a hundred thousand. It is also at this age that the skillful master begins
to take on the true function of the observer and philosopher who knows the art of
sounding hearts while working to form them. As long as the young man does not think
of dissembling and has not yet learned how to do it, with every object one presents
to him one sees in his manner, his eyes, and his gestures the impression it makes
on him. One reads in his face all the movements of his soul. By dint of spying them
out, one gets to be able to foresee them and finally to direct them.
It is to be noted in general that all men are affected sooner and more generally by
wounds, cries, groans, the apparatus of painful operations, and all that brings
objects of suffering to the senses. The idea of destruction, since it is more
complex, is not similarly striking; the image of death has a later and weaker
effect because no one has within himself the experience of death. One must have
seen corpses to feel the agonies of the dying. But when this image has once been
well formed in our mind, there is no spectacle more horrible to our eyes—
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whether because of the idea of total destruction it then gives by means of the
senses, or whether because, knowing that this moment is inevitable for all men, one
feels oneself more intensely affected by a situation one is sure of not being able
to escape.
These diverse impressions have their modifications and their degrees which depend
on the particular character of each individual and his previous habits. But they
are universal, and no one is completely exempt from them. There exist later and
less general impressions which are more appropriate to sensitive souls. These are
the ones resulting from moral suffering, from inner pains, affliction, languor, and
sadness. There are people who can be moved only by cries and tears. The long, muted
groans of a heart gripped by anguish have never wrested sighs from them. Never has
the sight of a downcast countenance, of a gaunt gray visage, of a dull eye no
longer able to cry, made them cry themselves. The ills of the soul are nothing for
them. They are judged; their souls feel nothing. Expect from them only inflexible
rigor, hardness, and cruelty. They may be men of integrity and justice, but never
clement, generous, and pitying. I say that they may be just—if, that is, a man can
be just when he is not merciful.
But do not be in a hurry to judge young people by this rule, especially those who,
having been raised as they ought to be, have no idea of moral suffering that they
have never been made to experience; for, to repeat, they can pity only ills they
know, and this apparent insensibility, which comes only from ignorance, is soon
changed into compassion when they begin to feel that there are in human life
countless pains they did not know. As for my Emile, if he has had simplicity and
good sense in his childhood, I am sure that he will have soul and sensibility in
his youth—for truth of sentiments depends in large measure on correctness of ideas.
But why recall it here? More than one reader will doubtless reproach me for
forgetting my first resolve and the constant happiness I had promised my pupil.
Unhappy men, dying ones, sights of pain and misery! What happiness! What enjoyment
for a young heart being born to life! His gloomy teacher, who designed so sweet an
education for him, treats him as born only to suffer. This is what will be said.
What difference does it make to me? I promised to make him happy, not to appear to
be. Is it my fault if you, always dupes of appearance, take it for reality?
Let us take two young men, emerging from their first education and entering into
society by two directly opposite paths. One suddenly climbs up to Olympus and moves
in the most brilliant world. He is brought to the court, to the nobles, to the
rich, to the pretty women. I assume that he is made much of everywhere, and I do
not examine the effect of this greeting on his reason—I assume that his reason
resists it. Pleasures fly to him; every day new objects entertain him. He abandons
himself to everything with an interest which seduces you. You see him attentive,
eager, curious. His initial admiration strikes you. You take him to be satisfied;
but look at the condition of his soul. You believe he is enjoying himself; I
believe he is suffering.
What does he first perceive on opening his eyes? Multitudes of
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alleged goods which he did not know, and most of which, since they are only for a
moment within his reach, seem to be revealed to him only to make him regret being
deprived of them. Does he wander through a palace? You see by his worried curiosity
that he is asking himself why his paternal house is not like it. All his questions
tell you that he is ceaselessly comparing himself with the master of this house;
and that all that he finds mortifying for himself in this parallel makes his vanity
rebel and thus sharpens it. If he encounters a young man better dressed than
himself, I see him secretly complain about his parents' avarice. Is he more adorned
than another? He is pained to see this other outshine him by birth or wit, and to
see all his gilding humiliated in the presence of a simple cloth suit. Is he the
only one to shine in a gathering? Does he stand on tiptoe to be seen better? Who is
not secretly disposed to put down the splendid and vain manner of a young fop? All
combine as though by plan: the disturbing glances of a serious man, the scoffing
words of a caustic one are not long in reaching him. And were he despised by only a
single man, that man's contempt instantly poisons the others' applause.
Let us give him everything. Let us lavish charms and merit on him. Let him be
handsome, very clever, and lovable. He will be sought out by women. But in seeking
him out before he loves them, they will unhinge him rather than make a lover out of
him. He will have successes, but he will have neither transports nor passion for
enjoying them. Since his desires, always provided for in advance, never have time
to be born, he feels in the bosom of pleasures only the boredom of constraint. The
sex made for the happiness of his sex disgusts him and satiates him even before he
knows it. If he continues to see women, he does so only out of vanity. And if he
were to attach himself to them out of a true taste, he will not be the only young
man, the only brilliant one, or the only attractive one and will not always find
his beloveds to be prodigies of fidelity.
I say nothing of the worries, the betrayals, the black deeds, the re-pentings of
all kinds inseparable from such a life. It is known that experience of society
causes disgust with it. I am speaking only of the troubles connected with the first
illusion.
What a contrast for someone who has been restricted to the bosom of his family and
his friends, where he has seen himself the sole object of all their attentions, to
enter suddenly into an order of things where he counts for so little, to find
himself, as it were, drowned in an alien sphere—he who for so long was the center
of his own sphere! How many affronts, how many humiliations must he absorb before
losing, amidst strangers, the prejudices of his importance which were acquired and
nourished amidst his own relatives! As a child everything gave way to him,
everything around him was eager to serve him; as a young man he must give way to
everyone. Or, for the little he forgets himself and keeps his old ways, how many
hard lessons are going to make him come back to himself! The habit of easily
getting the objects of his desires leads him to desire much and makes him sense
continual privations. Everything that pleases him tempts him; everything others
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have, he wants to have. He covets everything; he is envious of everyone. He would
want to dominate everywhere. Vanity gnaws at him. The ardor of unbridled desires
inflames his young heart; jealousy and hate are born along with them. All the
devouring passions take flight at the same time. He brings their agitation into the
tumult of society. He brings it back with him every night. He comes home
discontented with himself and others. He goes to sleep full of countless vain
projects, troubled by countless whims. And even in his dreams his pride paints the
chimerical goods, desire for which torments him and which he will never in his life
possess. This is your pupil. Let us see mine.
If the first sight that strikes him is an object of sadness, the first return to
himself is a sentiment of pleasure. In seeing how many ills he is exempt from, he
feels himself to be happier than he had thought he was. He shares the sufferings of
his fellows; but this sharing is voluntary and sweet. At the same time he enjoys
both the pity he has for their ills and the happiness that exempts him from those
ills. He feels himself to be in that condition of strength which extends us beyond
ourselves and leads us to take elsewhere activity superfluous to our well-being. To
pity another's misfortune one doubtless needs to know it, but one does not need to
feel it. When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but
when one is suffering, one pities only oneself. But if, since all are subject to
the miseries of life, we accord to others only that sensibility that we do not
currently need for ourselves, it follows that commiseration ought to be a very
sweet sentiment, since it speaks well of us. A hard man, on the contrary, is always
unhappy, for the condition of his heart leaves him no superabundant sensibility he
can accord to the suffering of others.
We judge happiness too much on the basis of appearances; we suppose it to be there
where it is least present. We seek it where it could not be. Gaiety is only a very
equivocal sign. A gay man is often only an unfortunate one who seeks to mislead
others and to forget himself. These people who are so given to laughter, so open,
so serene in a group, are almost all gloomy and scolds at home, and their domestics
pay the penalty for the entertainment they provide in society. True satisfaction is
neither gay nor wild. One is jealous of so sweet a sentiment, and, in tasting it,
one thinks about it, savors it, fears it will evaporate. A truly happy man hardly
speaks and hardly laughs. He draws, so to speak, the happiness up around his heart.
Boisterous games and turbulent joy veil disgust and boredom. But melancholy is the
friend of delight. Tenderness and tears accompany the sweetest enjoyments, and
excessive joy itself plucks tears rather than laughs.
If at first the multitude and the variety of entertainments appear to contribute to
happiness, if the uniformity of a steady life at first appears boring, upon taking
a better look one finds, on the contrary, that the sweetest habit of soul consists
in a moderation of enjoyment which leaves little opening for desire and disgust.
The restlessness of desire produces curiosity and inconstancy. The emptiness of
turbulent pleasure produces boredom. One is never bored with his condition when one
knows none more agreeable. Of all the men in the world savages are
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EMILE
the least curious and the least bored. They are indifferent to everything. They
enjoy not things but themselves. They pass their lives in doing nothing and are
never bored.
The man of the world is whole in his mask. Almost never being in himself, he is
always alien and ill at ease when forced to go back there. What he is, is nothing;
what he appears to be is everything for him.
I cannot prevent mysel" from imagining on the face of the young man of whom I have
previously spoken something impertinent, sugary, affected, which displeases and
repels plain people; and on that of my young man an interesting and simple
expression that reveals satisfaction and true serenity of soul, inspires esteem and
confidence, and seems to await only the offering of friendship to return friendship
to those who approach him. It is believed that the face is only a simple
development of features already drawn by nature. I, however, think that beyond this
development the features of a man's visage are imperceptibly formed and take on a
typical cast as a result of the frequent and habitual impression of certain
affections of the soul. These affections leave their mark on the visage; nothing is
more certain. And when they turn into habits, they must leave durable impressions
on it. This is my conception of how the face indicates character, and the latter
can sometimes be judged by the former without looking for mysterious explanations
which assume knowledge we do not have.K
A child has only two marked affections, joy and pain. He laughs or he cries; the
intermediates are nothing for him. He ceaselessly passes from one of these
movements to the other. This constant alternation prevents them from making any
permanent impression on his face and giving it a characteristic expression. But at
the age when he has become more sensitive and is more intensely or more constantly
affected, more profound impressions leave traces that are more difficult to
destroy; and from the habitual condition of the soul there results an arrangement
of the features which time renders ineradicable. Nevertheless, it is not rare to
see men's faces change at different ages. I have seen several men in whom this has
occurred, and I have always found that those I had been able to observe well and to
follow had also changed habitual passions. This observation alone, which is well
confirmed, would appear to me to be decisive; and it is not misplaced in a treatise
on education, in which it is important to learn to judge movements of the soul by
external signs.
I do not know whether my young man, because he has not learned to imitate
conventional manners and to feign sentiments he does not have, will be less
lovable. That is not the object here. I only know that he will be more loving, and
I have difficulty believing that someone who loves only himself can disguise
himself well enough to be as pleasing as someone who draws from his attachment to
others a new sentiment of happiness. But as for this sentiment itself, I believe I
have said enough about it to guide a reasonable reader on this question and to show
that I have not contradicted myself.
I return, therefore, to my method, and I say: when the critical age approaches,
furnish young people with sights which restrain them and not with sights which
arouse them. Put their nascent imaginations off
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the track with objects which, far from inflaming, repress the activity of their
senses. Remove them from big cities where the adornment and the immodesty of women
hasten and anticipate nature's lessons, where everything presents to their eyes
pleasures they ought to know only when they are able to choose among them. Bring
them back to their first abodes where rustic simplicity lets the passions of their
age develop less rapidly. Or if their taste for the arts still attaches them to the
city, keep them from a dangerous idleness by means of this very taste. Choose with
care their society, their occupations, their pleasures. Show them only scenes which
are touching but modest, which stir them without seducing them, and which nourish
their sensibilities without moving their senses. Be aware also that everywhere
there are excesses to fear and that immoderate passions always do more harm than
what one wants to avoid by means of them. The object is not to make your pupil a
male nurse or a brother of charity, not to afflict his sight with constant objects
of pain and suffering, not to march from sick person to sick person, from hospital
to hospital, and from the Greve 9 to the prisons. He must be touched and not
hardened by the sight of human miseries. Long struck by the same sights, we no
longer feel their impressions. Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too
much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills
of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and
doctors become pitiless. Therefore, let your pupil know the fate of man and the
miseries of his fellows, but do not let him witness them too often. A single object
well chosen and shown in a suitable light will provide him emotion and reflection
for a month. It is not so much what he sees as his looking back on what he has seen
that determines the judgment he makes about it; and the durable impression he
receives from an object comes to him less from the object itself than from the
point of view which one induces him to take in recalling it. It is by thus
husbanding examples, lessons, and images that you will long blunt the needle of the
senses and put nature off the track by following its own directions.
To the extent he becomes enlightened, choose ideas which take account of that fact;
to the extent his desires catch fire, choose scenes fit to repress them. An old
soldier who had distinguished himself as much by his morals as by his courage told
me that in his early youth, when his father, a sensible but very pious man, saw his
son's nascent temperament delivering him to women, he spared no effort to restrain
him. But finally, sensing that his son was about to get away from him in spite of
all his efforts, the father took the expedient of bringing him to a hospital for
syphilitics and, without giving him any warning, made him enter a room where a
troop of these unfortunates expiated by a horrible treatment the dissoluteness
which had exposed them to it. At this hideous sight, which revolted all the senses
at once, the young man almost got sick. "Go on, miserable profligate," his father
then said in a vehement tone, "follow the vile inclination which drags you along.
Soon you will be only too happy to be admitted to this room where, a victim of the
most infamous pains, you will force your father to thank God for your death."
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E M IL E
These few words, joined to the emphatic scene which struck the young man, made an
impression on him which was never effaced. Condemned by his station to spend his
youth in garrisons, he preferred to absorb all the mockery of his comrades rather
than to imitate their libertinism. "I was a man," he said to me, "I had weaknesses.
But up to my present age I have never been able to see a public woman without
disgust." Master, make few speeches! But learn to choose places, times, and
persons. Then give all your lessons in examples, and be sure of their effect.
The way childhood is employed is not very important. The evil which slips in then
is not without remedy, and the good done then can come later. But this is not the
case with the first age at which man begins truly to live. This age never lasts
long enough for the use that ought to be made of it, and its importance demands an
unflagging attention. This is why I insist on the art of prolonging it. One of the
best precepts of good culture is to slow up everything as much as is possible. Make
progress by slow and sure steps. Prevent the adolescent's becoming a man until the
moment when nothing remains for him to do to become one. While the body grows, the
spirits designed to provide balm for the blood and strength for the fibers are
formed and developed. If you cause those spirits, which are intended for the
perfection of an individual, to take a different course and be used for the
formation of another individual, both remain in a state of weakness, and nature's
work stays imperfect. The operations of the mind feel in their turn the effect of
this corruption, and the soul, as debilitated as the body, performs its functions
only in a weak and languorous fashion. Large and robust limbs make neither courage
nor genius; and I can conceive that strength of soul may not accompany that of the
body, especially when the organs of communication between the two substances are in
poor condition. But, however good the condition of those organs may be, they will
always act weakly if they have as their principle only blood that is exhausted,
impoverished, and bereft of the substance giving strength and activity to all the
springs of the machine. Generally one notices more vigor of soul in men whose young
years have been preserved from premature corruption than in those whose
dissoluteness began with their power to give themselves over to that corruption.
And this is doubtless one of the reasons why peoples with morals ordinarily surpass
peoples without morals in good sense and courage. The latter shine solely by
certain subtle qualities which they call wit, sagacity, and delicacy. But those
great and noble functions of wisdom and reason which distinguish and honor man by
fair actions, by virtues, and by truly useful efforts are hardly to be found except
among the former.
Masters complain that the fire of this age makes youth unmanageable, and I see that
this is so. But is it not their fault? So soon as they have let this fire take its
course through the senses, do they not know that one can no longer give it another
course? Will a pedant's long, cold sermons efface in his pupil's mind the image of
the pleasures he has conceived? Will they banish from his heart the desires which
torment him? Will they stifle the ardor of a temperament which he knows
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how to put to use? Will he not become enfiamed against the obstacles opposed to the
only happiness of which he has an idea? And in the harsh law prescribed to him
without his being enabled to understand it, what will he see other than the caprice
and hatred of a man who seeks to torment him? Is it strange that he rebels and
hates that man in turn?
I can well conceive that in making himself pliant a master can make himself more
bearable and preserve an apparent authority. But I do not see very well the use of
the authority kept over one's pupil only by fomenting the vices it ought to
repress. It is as though to calm an impetuous horse the equerry were to make him
jump over the edge of a precipice.
This adolescent fire, far from being an obstacle to education, is the means of
consummating and completing it. It gives you a hold on a young man's heart when he
ceases to be weaker than you. His first affections are the reins with which you
direct all his movements. He was free, and now I see him enslaved. So long as he
loved nothing, he depended only on himself and his needs. As soon as he loves, he
depends on his attachments. Thus are formed the first bonds linking him to his
species. In directing his nascent sensibility to his species, do not believe that
it will at the outset embrace all men, and that the word mankind will signify
anything to him. No, this sensibility will in the first place be limited to his
fellows, and for him his fellows will not be unknowns; rather, they will be those
with whom he has relations, those whom habit has made dear or necessary to him,
those whom he observes to have ways of thinking and feeling clearly in common with
him, those whom he sees exposed to the pains he has suffered and sensitive to the
pleasures he has tasted, those, in a word, whose nature has a more manifest
identity with his own and thus make him more disposed to love himself. It will be
only after having cultivated his nature in countless ways, after many reflections
on his own sentiments and on those he observes in others, that he will be able to
get to the point of generalizing his individual notions under the abstract idea of
humanity and to join to his particular affections those which can make him identify
with his species.
In becoming capable of attachment, he becomes sensitive to that of others * and
thereby attentive to the signs of this attachment. Do you see what a new empire you
are going to acquire over him? How many chains you have put around his heart before
he notices them! What will he feel when, opening his eyes to himself, he sees what
you have done for him, when he can compare himself to other young people of his age
and you to other governors? I say when he sees, but resist telling him. If you tell
him, he will no longer see it. If you exact obedience from him in return for the
efforts you have made on his behalf, he will believe that you have trapped him. He
will say to himself that, while feigning to oblige him for nothing, you aspired to
put him in debt and
* Attachment can exist without being returned, but friendship never can. It is an
exchange, a contract like others, but it is the most sacred of all. The word friend
has no correlative other than itself. Any man who is not his friend's friend is
most assuredly a cheat, for it is only in returning or feigning to return
friendship that one can obtain it.
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EMILE
to bind him by a contract to which he did not consent. It will be in vain that you
add that what you are demanding from him is only for himself. You are demanding in
any event, and you are demanding in virtue of what you have done without his
consent. When an unfortunate takes the money that one feigned to give him, and
finds himself enlisted in spite of himself, you protest against the injustice.10
Are you not still more unjust in asking your pupil to pay the price for care he did
not request?
Ingratitude would be rarer if usurious benefactions were less common. We like what
does us good. It is so natural a sentiment! Ingratitude is not in the heart of man,
but self-interest is. There are fewer obligated ingrates than self-interested
benefactors. If you sell me your gifts, I shall haggle about the price. But if you
feign giving in order to sell later at your price, you are practicing fraud. It is
their being free that makes these gifts priceless. The heart receives laws only
from itself. By wanting to enchain it, one releases it; one enchains it by leaving
it free.
When the fisherman puts a lure in the water, the fish comes and stays around it
without distrust. But when caught by the hook hidden under the bait, it feels the
line being pulled back and tries to flee. Is the fisherman the benefactor, and is
the fish ungrateful? Does one ever see that a man forgotten by his benefactor
forgets him? On the contrary, he always speaks of him with pleasure; he does not
think of him without tenderness. If he finds an occasion to show his benefactor
that he recalls his services by some unexpected service of his own, with what inner
satisfaction does he then act to demonstrate his gratitude! With what sweet joy he
gains the other's gratitude! With what transport does he say to him, "My turn has
come!" This is truly the voice of nature. Never did a true benefaction produce an
ingrate.
If, therefore, gratitude is a natural sentiment, and you do not destroy its effect
by your errors, rest assured that your pupil, as he begins to see the value of your
care, will be appreciative of it—provided that you yourself have not put a price on
it—and that this will give you an authority in his heart that nothing can destroy.
But until you are quite sure you have gained this advantage, take care not to lose
it by insisting on what you deserve from him. To vaunt your services is to make
them unendurable for him. To forget them is to make him remember them. Until it is
time to treat him like a man, let the issue be never what he owes you but what he
owes himself. To make him docile, leave him all his freedom; hide yourself so that
he may seek you. Lift his soul to the noble sentiment of gratitude by never
speaking to him of anything but his interest. I did not want him to be told that
what was done was for his good before he was in a condition to understand it. In
this speech he would have seen only your dependence, and he would have taken you
only for his valet. But now that he begins to feel what it is to love, he also
feels what a sweet bond can unite a man to what he loves; and in the zeal which
makes you constantly busy yourself with him, he sees a slave's attachment no longer
but a friend's affection. Nothing has so much weight in the human heart as the
voice of clearly recognized friendship, for we know that it never speaks to us for
anything other
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than our interest. One can believe that a friend makes a mistake but not that he
would want to deceive us. Sometimes one resists his advice, but one never despises
it.
Finally we enter the moral order. We have just made a second step into manhood. If
this were the place for it, I would try to show how the first voices of conscience
arise out of the first movements of the heart, and how the first notions of good
and bad are born of the sentiments of love and hate. I would show that justice and
goodness are not merely abstract words—pure moral beings formed by the
understanding—but are true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, are hence
only an ordered development of our primitive affections; that by reason alone,
independent of conscience, no natural law can be established; and that the entire
right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the
human heart.* But I am reminded that my business here is not producing treatises on
metaphysics and morals or courses of study of any kind. It is sufficient for me to
mark out the order and the progress of our sentiments and our knowledge relative to
our constitution. Others will perhaps demonstrate what I only indicate here.
Since my Emile has until now looked only at himself, the first glance he casts on
his fellows leads him to compare himself with them. And the first sentiment aroused
in him by this comparison is the desire to be in the first position. This is the
point where love of self turns into amour-propre and where begin to arise all the
passions which depend on this one. But to decide whether among these passions the
dominant ones in his character will be humane and gentle or cruel and malignant,
whether they will be passions of beneficence and commiseration or of envy and
covetousness, we must know what position he will feel he has among men, and what
kinds of obstacles he may believe he has to overcome to reach the position he wants
to occupy.
To guide him in this research, we must now show him men by means of their
differences, having already showed him men by means of the accidents common to the
species. Now comes the measurement of natural and civil inequality and the picture
of the whole social order.
Society must be studied by means of men, and men by means of society. Those who
want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of
either of the two. We see how men,
* Even the precept of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us has no
true foundation other than conscience and sentiment; for where is the precise
reason for me, being myself, to act as if I were another, especially when I am
morally certain of never finding myself in the same situation? And who will
guarantee me that in very faithfully following this maxim I will get others to
follow it similarly with me? The wicked man gets advantage from the just man's
probity and his own injustice. He is delighted that everyone, with the exception of
himself, be just. This agreement, whatever may be said about it, is not very
advantageous for good men. But when the strength of an expansive soul makes me
identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in
order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for
love of myself, and the reason for the precept is in nature itself, which inspires
in me the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence. From this
I conclude that it is not true that the precepts of natural law are founded on
reason alone. They have a base more solid and sure. Love of men derived from love
of self is the principle of human justice. The summation of all morality is given
by the Gospel in its summation of the law.
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EMILE
in attaching themselves at first to the primary relations, ought to be affected by
them and what passions ought to arise from them. We see that it is by the progress
of the passions in turn that these relations are multiplied and become closer. It
is less the strength of arms than the moderation of hearts which makes men
independent and free. Whoever desires few things depends on few people. But always
confusing our vain desires with our physical needs, those who have made the latter
the foundations of human society have always taken the effects for the causes and
have only succeeded in going astray in all their reasonings.
In the state of nature there is a de facto equality that is real and
indestructible, because it is impossible in that state for the difference between
man and man by itself to be great enough to make one dependent on another. In the
civil state there is a de jure equality that is chimerical and vain, because the
means designed to maintain it themselves serve to destroy it, and because the
public power, added to that of the stronger to oppress the weak, breaks the sort of
equilibrium nature had placed between them.* From this first contradiction flow all
those that are observed in the civil order between appearance and reality. The
multitude will always be sacrificed to the few, and the public interest to
particular interest. Those specious names, justice and order, will always serve as
instruments of violence and as arms of iniquity. From this it follows that the
distinguished orders who claim they are useful to the others are actually useful
only to themselves at the expense of their subordinates; it is on this basis that
one ought to judge the consideration which is due them according to justice and
reason. In order to know how each of us ought to judge his own lot, it remains to
be seen whether the rank these men have grabbed is more advantageous for the
happiness of those who occupy it. This is now the study which is important for us.
But to do it well, we must begin by knowing the human heart.11
If the object were only to show young people man by means of his mask, there would
be no need of showing them this; it is what they would always be seeing in any
event. But since the mask is not the man and his varnish must not seduce them,
portray men for them such as they are—not in order that young people hate them but
that they pity them and not want to resemble them. This is, to my taste, the best-
conceived sentiment that man can have about his species.
With this in view, it is important here to take a route opposed to the one we have
followed until now and to instruct the young man by others' experience rather than
his own. If men deceive him, he will hate them; but if, respected by them, he sees
them deceive one another mutually, he will pity them. The spectacle of society,
Pythagoras said, resembles that of the Olympic games. Some keep shop there and
think only of their profit; others spend their persons and seek glory; others are
content to see the games, and these are not the worst.12
I would want a young man's society to be chosen so carefully that he
* The universal spirit of the laws of every country is always to favor the strong
against the weak and those who have against those who have not. This difficulty is
inevitable, and it is without exception.
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BOOK IV
thinks well of those who live with him; and I would want him to be taught to know
the world so well that he thinks ill of all that takes place in it. Let him know
that man is naturally good; let him feel it; let him judge his neighbor by himself.
But let him see that society depraves and perverts men; let him find in their
prejudices the source of all their vices; let him be inclined to esteem each
individual but despise the multitude; let him see that all men wear pretty much the
same mask, but let him also know that there are faces more beautiful than the mask
covering them.
This method, it must be admitted, has its difficulties and is not easy in practice;
for if he becomes an observer too soon, if you give him practice at spying on
others' actions too closely, you make him a scandalmonger and a satirist,
peremptory and quick to judge. He will get an odious pleasure out of seeking for
sinister interpretations of everything and of seeing nothing from the good side,
even what is good. He will, at the least, get accustomed to the spectacle of vice
and to seeing wicked men without disgust, as one gets accustomed to seeing unhappy
men without pity. Soon the general perversity will serve him less as a lesson than
as an example. He will say to himself that if man is thus, he himself ought not to
want to be otherwise.
If you want to instruct him by principles and teach him, along with the nature of
the human heart, the external causes which are brought to bear on it and turn our
inclinations into vices, you employ a meta-physic he is not in a condition to
understand by thus transporting him all of a sudden from sensible objects to
intellectual objects. You fall back into the difficulty so carefully avoided up to
now of giving him lessons resembling lessons, of substituting in his mind the
master's experience and authority for his own experience and the progress of his
reason.
To remove both of these obstacles at once and to put the human heart in his reach
without risk of spoiling his own, I would want to show him men from afar, to show
him them in other times or other places and in such a way that he can see the stage
without ever being able to act on it. This is the moment for history. It is by
means of history that, without the lessons of philosophy, he will read the hearts
of men; it is by means of history that he will see them, a simple spectator,
disinterested and without passion, as their judge and not as their accomplice or as
their accuser.
To know men, one must see them act. In society one hears them speak. They show
their speeches and hide their actions. But in history their actions are unveiled,
and one judges them on the basis of the facts. Even their talk helps in evaluating
them; for in comparing what they do with what they say, one sees both what they are
and what they want to appear to be. The more they disguise themselves, the better
one knows them.
Unhappily this study has its dangers, its disadvantages of more than one kind. It
is difficult to find a viewpoint from which one can judge his fellows equitably.
One of the great vices of history is that it paints men's bad sides much more than
their good ones. Because history is interesting only by means of revolutions and
catastrophes, so long as a
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EMILE
people grows and prospers calmly with a peaceful government, history says nothing
of it. History begins to speak of a people only when, no longer sufficing unto
itself, it gets involved in its neighbors' affairs or lets them get involved in its
affairs. History makes a people illustrious only when it is already in its decline;
all our histories begin where they ought to finish. We have a very precise history
of peoples who are destroying themselves; what we lack is the history of peoples
who are thriving. They are fortunate enough and prudent enough for history to have
nothing to say of them; in fact, we see even in our day that the best-conducted
governments are those of which one speaks least. We know, therefore, only the bad;
the good is hardly epoch-making. It is only the wicked who are famous; the good are
forgotten or made ridiculous. And this is how history, like philosophy, ceaselessly
calumniates humankind.
Moreover, the facts described by history are far from being an exact portrayal of
the same facts as they happened. They change form in the historian's head; they are
molded according to his interests; they take on the complexion of his prejudices.
Who knows how to put the reader exactly on the spot of the action to see an event
as it took place? Ignorance or partiality disguise everything. Without even
altering a historical deed, but by expanding or contracting the circumstances which
relate to it, how many different faces one can give to it! Put the same object in
different perspectives, it will hardly appear the same; nevertheless nothing will
have changed but the eye of the spectator. Is it sufficient for truth's honor to
tell me a true fact while making me see it quite otherwise than the way it took
place? How many times did a tree more or less, a stone to the right or to the left,
a cloud of dust raised by the wind determine the result of a combat without
anyone's having noticed it? Does this prevent the historian from telling you the
cause of the defeat or the victory with as much assurance as if he had been
everywhere? Of what importance to me are the facts in themselves when the reason
for them remains unknown to me, and what lessons can I draw from an event of whose
true cause I am ignorant? The historian gives me one, but he counterfeits it; and
critical history itself, which is making such a sensation, is only an art of
conjecture, the art of choosing among several lies the one best resembling the
truth.
Have you never read Cleopatra or Cassandra 13 or other books of this kind? The
author chooses a known event; then, accommodating it to his views, adorning it with
details of his invention, with personages who never existed and imaginary
portraits, he piles fictions on fictions to make reading him more agreeable. I see
little difference between these novels and your histories, unless it be that the
novelist yields more to his own imagination, while the historian enslaves himself
to another's. I shall add to this, if one wishes, that the former sets himself a
moral goal, good or bad, which is hardly a concern for the latter.
I will be told that the fidelity of history is of less interest than the truth of
morals and characters; provided that the human heart is well depicted, it is of
little importance that events be faithfully reported; for, after all, it is added,
what difference do facts occurring two thousand years ago make to us? That is right
if the portraits are well
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rendered according to nature. But if most have their model only in the historian's
imagination, is this not to fall back into the difficulty one wanted to flee, and
to give to the authority of the writer what one wanted to take away from that of
the master? If my pupil is only going to see pictures based on fantasy, I prefer
that they be drawn by my hand rather than that of another. They will at least be
better suited for him.
The worst historians for a young man are those who make judgments. Facts! Facts!
And let him make his own judgments. It is thus that he learns to know men. If the
author's judgment guides him constantly, all he does is see with another's eye; and
when that eye fails him, he no longer sees anything.
I leave modern history aside, not only because it no longer has a physiognomy and
our men all resemble one another; but because our historians, mindful only of being
brilliant, dream of nothing but producing highly colored portraits which often
represent nothing.* Generally the ancients make fewer portraits and put less wit
and more sense in their judgments. Even with them one must be very selective, and
not the most judicious but the simplest must be chosen first. I would not want to
put either Polybius or Sallust in the hand of a young man. Tacitus is the book of
old men; young people are not ready for understanding him. One has to learn to see
in human actions the primary features of man's heart before wanting to sound its
depths. One has to know how to read facts well before reading maxims. Philosophy in
maxims is suitable only to those who have experience. Youth ought to generalize in
nothing. Its whole instruction should be in particular rules.
Thucydides is to my taste the true model of historians. He reports the facts
without judging them, but he omits none of the circumstances proper to make us
judge them ourselves. He puts all he recounts before the reader's eyes. Far from
putting himself between the events and his readers, he hides himself. The reader no
longer believes he reads; he believes he sees. Unhappily, Thucydides always speaks
of war; and one sees in his narratives almost nothing but the least instructive
thing in the world—that is, battles. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand and Caesar's
Commentaries have pretty nearly the same wisdom and the same defect. The good
Herodotus, without portraits, without maxims, but flowing, naive, full of the
details most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of
historians if these very details did not often degenerate into puerile simplicities
more fit to spoil the taste of youth than to form it. One must already have
discernment to read him. I say nothing of Livy. His turn will come. But he is
political; he is rhetorical; he is everything which is unsuitable for this age.
History in general is defective in that it records only palpable and distinct facts
which can be fixed by names, places, and dates, while the slow and progressive
causes of these facts, which cannot be similarly assigned, always remain unknown.
One often finds in a battle won or lost the reason for a revolution which even
before this battle had
* See Davila, Guicciardini, Strada, Solis, Machiavelli, and sometimes de Thou
himself. Vertot is almost the only one who knew how to depict without making
portraits.
[2.39]
EMILE
already become inevitable. War hardly does anything other than make manifest
outcomes already determined by moral causes which historians rarely know how to
see.
The philosophic spirit has turned the reflections of several writers of our age in
this direction. But I doubt that the truth gains by their work. The rage for
systems having taken possession of them all, each seeks to see things not as they
are but as they agree with his system.
Add to all these reflections the fact that history shows actions far more than men,
because it grasps the latter only in certain selected moments, in their parade
clothes. It exhibits only the public man who has dressed himself to be seen. It
does not follow him in his home, in his study, in his family, among his friends. It
depicts him only when he plays a role. It depicts his costume far more than his
person.
I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with the reading of lives of
individuals; for in them, however much the man may conceal himself, the historian
pursues him everywhere. He leaves him no moment of respite, no nook where he can
avoid the spectator's piercing eye; and it is when the subject believes he has
hidden himself best that the biographer makes him known best. "Those who write
lives," says Montaigne, "are more suited to me to the extent that they are
interested in intentions more than in results, in what takes place within more than
in what happens without. This is why Plutarch is my man." ,4
It is true that the genius of assembled men or of peoples is quite different from a
man's character in private, and that one would know the human heart very
imperfectly if he did not examine it also in the multitude. But it is no less true
that one must begin by studying man in order to judge men, and that he who knew
each individual's inclinations perfectly could foresee all their effects when
combined in the body of the people.
We must again have recourse to the ancients here—for the reasons I have already
mentioned, and also because all the intimate and low, but true and characteristic
details are banished from modern style. Men are as adorned by our authors in their
private lives as on the stage of the world. Propriety, no less severe in writings
than in actions, now permits to be said in public only what it permits to be done
in public. And since one can show men only when they are forever playing a part,
they are no more known in our books than in our theaters. The lives of kings may
very well be written and rewritten a hundred times; we shall have no more
Suetoniuses.*
Plutarch excels in these very details into which we no longer dare to enter. He has
an inimitable grace at depicting great men in small things; and he is so felicitous
in the choice of his stories that often a word, a smile, or a gesture is enough for
him to characterize his hero. With a joking phrase Hannibal reassures his terrified
army and makes it march laughing to the battle which won Italy for him.1(i
Agesilaus
* One of our historians who imitated Tacitus in the grand details was the only one
to dare to imitate Suetonius and sometimes to copy Commines in the petty ones; and
this very fact, which adds to the value of his book, has caused him to be
criticized among us.,s
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astride a stick makes me love the Great King's conqueror.17 Caesar passing through
a poor village and chatting with his friends betrays, unthinkingly, the deceiver
who said he wanted only to be Pompey's equal.18 Alexander swallows medicine and
does not say a single word; it is the most beautiful moment of his life.1"
Aristides writes his own name on a shell and thus justifies his surname.20
Philopoemen, with his cloak off, cuts wood in his host's kitchen.21 This is the
true art of painting. Physiognomy does not reveal itself in large features, nor
character in great actions. It is in bagatelles that nature comes to light. The
public things are either too uniform or too artificial; and it is almost solely on
these that modern dignity permits our authors to dwell.
M. de Turenne was incontestably one of the greatest men of the last century. We
have had the courage to make his life interesting by means of little details which
make him known and loved. But how many details have we been forced to suppress
which would have made him still better known and loved. I shall mention only one
which I have from a good source and which Plutarch would have been careful not to
omit, but which Ramsay Ti would have been careful not to write had he known it.
One summer day when it was very hot, Viscount de Turenne, wearing a little white
jacket and a cap, was at the window in his antechamber. One of his servants
happened along and, deceived by his clothing, took him for a kitchen helper with
whom this domestic was familiar. He quietly approached from behind and with a hand
that was not light gave him a hard slap on the buttocks. The man struck turned
around immediately. The valet saw with a shudder his master's face. He fell to his
knees in utter despair. "My lord, I believed it was George!" "And if it had been
George," shouted Turenne, while rubbing his behind, "there was no need to hit so
hard." Is this, then, what you dare not tell? Wretches! Then be forever without
naturalness, without vitals. Temper and harden your iron hearts in your vile
propriety. Make yourselves contemptible by dint of dignity. But you, good young
man, who read this story and who sense with emotion all the sweetness of soul it
reveals at the very first reaction, read also about the pettiness of this great man
as soon as it was a question of his birth and his name. Think that it is the same
Turenne who affected giving way to his nephew everywhere in order that it be
clearly seen that this child was the head of a sovereign house.28 Set these
contrasts side by side, love nature, despise opinion, and know man.
Very few people are in a condition to conceive the effects that reading directed in
this way can have on a young man's completely fresh mind. We are bent over books
from our childhood and accustomed to read without thinking; what we read is all the
less striking to us since we already contain within ourselves the passions and the
prejudices which fill history and the lives of men, and therefore all men do
appears natural to us because we are outside of nature and judge others by
ourselves. But picture a young man raised according to my maxims. Think of my
Emile. Eighteen years of assiduous care have had as their only object the
preservation of a sound judgment and a healthy heart.
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EMILE
Think of him at the raising of the curtain, casting his eyes for the first time on
the stage of the world; or, rather, set backstage, seeing the actors take up and
put on their costumes, counting the cords and pulleys whose crude magic deceives
the spectators' eyes. His initial surprise will soon be succeeded by emotions of
shame and disdain for his species. He will be indignant at thus seeing the whole of
humankind its own dupe, debasing itself in these children's games. He will be
afflicted at seeing his brothers tear one another apart for the sake of dreams and
turn into ferocious animals because they do not know how to be satisfied with being
men. Certainly, given the pupil's natural dispositions, if the master brings a bit
of prudence and selectivity to his readings, if the master gives him a small start
on the way to the reflections he ought to draw from them, this exercise will be for
him a course in practical philosophy, better, surely, and better understood than
all the vain speculations by which young people's minds are scrambled in our
schools. When Cyneas, after having heard out the romantic projects of Pyrrhus, asks
him what real good the conquest of the world will procure for him which he cannot
enjoy right now without so much torment,24 we see only a fleeting bon mot; but
Emile will see a very wise reflection which he would have been the first to make
and which will never be effaced from his mind, because this reflection finds no
contrary prejudice that can prevent it from making an impression. When he then
reads the life of this madman and finds that all the latter's great designs ended
in his getting killed by a woman's hand, instead of admiring this pretended heroism
Emile will see nothing in all the exploits of so great a captain, in all the
intrigues of so great a statesman, other than so many steps on the road to that
fateful tile which would terminate his life and his projects by a dishonorable
death.25
All conquerors have not been killed; all usurpers have not failed in their
enterprises; several will appear happy to minds biased by vulgar opinions. But he
who does not stop at appearances but judges the happiness of men only by the
condition of their hearts will see their miseries in their very successes; he will
see their desires and their gnawing cares extend and increase with their fortune;
he will see them getting out of breath in advancing without ever reaching their
goals. He will see them as being similar to those inexperienced travelers who,
setting out for the first time in the Alps, think that at each mountain they have
crossed them, and when they are at a summit are discouraged to find higher
mountains ahead.
Augustus, after having subjected his fellow citizens and destroyed his rivals,
ruled for forty years the greatest empire which has ever existed. But did all that
immense power prevent him from beating his head against the walls and filling his
vast palace with his cries asking Varus for his exterminated legions back? 20 If he
had conquered all his enemies, what use would all his vain triumphs have been to
him when suffering of every kind was arising constantly around him, when his
dearest friends made attempts on his life, and when the shame or the death of all
those closest to him reduced him to tears? This un-
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fortunate man wanted to govern the world and did not know how to govern his own
household! What was the result of this negligence? He saw his nephew, his adopted
son, and his son-in-law perish in the prime of life. His grandson was reduced to
eating the stuffing of his bed in order to prolong his miserable life for a few
hours. His daughter and his granddaughter died after having covered him with their
infamy—one of poverty and hunger on a desert island, the other in prison by an
executioner's hand. Finally, he himself, the last survivor of his unhappy family,
was reduced by his own wife to leaving nothing but a monster as his successor. Such
was the fate of this master of the world, so famous for his glory and his
happiness.27 Can I believe that a single one of those who admire that glory and
that happiness would be willing to acquire them at the same price?
I have taken ambition as an example. But the play of all the human passions offers
similar lessons to whoever wants to study history in order to know himself and to
make himself wise at the expense of the dead. The time is approaching when the life
of Antony will provide the young man with more relevant instruction than the life
of Augustus. Emile will hardly recognize himself in the strange objects which will
strike his glance during these new studies. But he will know ahead of time how to
dispel the illusion of the passions before they are born; and, seeing that in all
times they have blinded men, he will be warned of the way in which they can blind
him in turn, if ever he yields to them. These lessons, I know, are ill suited to
him; perhaps in case of need they will be too late and insufficient. But remember
that they are not the lessons I wanted to draw from this study. In beginning it, I
set myself another goal; and certainly, if this goal is not well fulfilled, it will
be the master's fault.
Remember that as soon as amour-propre has developed, the relative I is constantly
in play, and the young man never observes others without returning to himself and
comparing himself with them. The issue, then, is to know in what rank among his
fellows he will put himself after having examined them. I see from the way young
people are made to read history that they are transformed, so to speak, into all
the persons they see; one endeavors to make them become now Cicero, now Trajan, now
Alexander, and to make them discouraged when they return to themselves, to make
each of them regret being only himself. This method has certain advantages which I
do not discount; but, as for my Emile, if in these parallels he just once prefers
to be someone other than himself—were this other Socrates, were it Cato—everything
has failed. He who begins to become alien to himself does not take long to forget
himself entirely.
It is not philosophers who know men best. They see them only through the prejudices
of philosophy, and I know of no station where one has so many. A savage has a
healthier judgment of us than a philosopher does. The latter senses his own vices,
is indignant at ours, and says to himself, "We are all wicked." The former looks at
us without emotion and says, "You are mad." He is right. No one does the bad for
the sake of the bad. My pupil is that savage, with the difference
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EMILE
that Emile, having reflected more, compared ideas more, seen our errors from closer
up, is more on guard against himself and judges only what he knows.
It is our passions which arouse us against those of others. It is our interest
which makes us hate the wicked. If they did us no harm, we would have more pity for
them than hate. The harm the wicked do us makes us forget the harm they do
themselves. We would pardon them their vices more easily if we knew how much they
are punished by their own heart. We feel the offense, and we do not see the
chastisement. The advantages are apparent; the pain is interior. He who believes he
enjoys the fruit of his vices is no less tormented than if he had not succeeded.
The object has changed; the anxiety is the same. They may very well show off their
fortunes and hide their hearts, but their conduct shows their hearts in spite of
themselves; but in order to see that, one must not have a heart like theirs.
The passions we share seduce us; those that conflict with our interests revolt us;
and, by an inconsistency which comes to us from these passions, we blame in others
what we would like to imitate. Aversion and illusion are inevitable when we are
forced to suffer from another the harm we would do if we were in his place.
What would be required, then, in order to observe men well? A great interest in
knowing them and a great impartiality in judging them. A heart sensitive enough to
conceive all the human passions and calm enough not to experience them. If there is
a favorable moment in life for this study, it is the one I have chosen for Emile.
Earlier, men would have been alien to him; later, he would have been like them.
Opinion, whose action he sees, has not acquired its empire over him. The passions,
whose effect he feels, have not yet agitated his heart. He is a man; he is
interested in his brothers; he is equitable; he judges his peers. Surely, if he
judges them well, he will not want to be in the place of any of them; for since the
goal of all the torments they give themselves is founded on prejudices he does not
have, it appears to him to be pie in the sky. For him, all that he desires is
within his reach. Sufficient unto himself and free of prejudices, on whom will he
be dependent? He has arms, health,* moderation, few needs, and the means of
satisfying them. Nurtured in the most absolute liberty, he conceives of no ill
greater than servitude. He pities these miserable kings, slaves of all that obey
them. He pities these false wise men, chained to their vain reputations. He pities
these rich fools, martyrs to their display. He pities these conspicuous
voluptuaries, who devote their entire lives to boredom in order to appear to have
pleasure. He would pity even the enemy who would do him harm, for he would see his
misery in his wickedness. He would say to himself, "In giving himself the need to
hurt me, this man has made his fate dependent on mine."
One more step, and we reach the goal. Amour-propre is a useful but dangerous
instrument. Often it wounds the hand making use of it and
* I believe I can confidently count health and a good constitution among the
advantages acquired through his education or, rather, among the gifts of nature his
education has preserved for him.
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rarely does good without evil. Emile, in considering his rank in the human species
and seeing himself so happily placed there, will be tempted to honor his reason for
the work of yours and to attribute his happiness to his own merit. He will say to
himself, "I am wise, and men are mad." In pitying them, he will despise them; in
congratulating himself, he will esteem himself more, and in feeling himself to be
happier than them, he will believe himself worthier to be so. This is the error
most to be feared, because it is the most difficult to destroy. If he remained in
this condition, he would have gained little from all our care; and if one had to
choose, I do not know whether I would not prefer the illusion of the prejudices to
that of pride.
Great men are not deceived about their superiority; they see it, feel it, and are
no less modest because of it. The more they have, the more they know all that they
lack. They are less vain about being raised above us than they are humbled by the
sentiment of their poverty; and with the exclusive goods which they possess, they
are too sensible to be vain about a gift they did not give themselves. The good man
can be proud of his virtue because it is his. But of what is the intelligent man
proud? What did Racine do not to be Pradon? What did Boileau do in order not to be
Cotin?
Here the issue is entirely different. Let us always remain in the common order. I
have assumed for my pupil neither a transcendent genius nor a dull understanding. I
have chosen him from among the ordinary minds in order to show what education can
do for man. All rare cases are outside the rules. Therefore, if as a consequence of
my care Emile prefers his way of being, of seeing, and of feeling to that of other
men, Emile is right. But if he thus believes himself to be of a more excellent
nature and more happily born than other men, Emile is wrong. He is deceived. One
must undeceive him or, rather, anticipate the error for fear that afterward it will
be too late to destroy it.
The sole folly of which one cannot disabuse a man who is not mad is vanity. For
this there is no cure other than experience—if, indeed, anything can cure it. At
its birth, at least, one can prevent its growth. Do not get lost in fine reasonings
intended to prove to the adolescent that he is a man like others and subject to the
same weaknesses. Make him feel it, or he will never know it. This again is a case
of an exception to my own rules; it is the case in which my pupil is to be exposed
voluntarily to all the accidents that can prove to him that he is no wiser than we
are. The adventure with the magician would be repeated in countless ways. I would
let flatterers take every advantage of him. If giddy fellows dragged him into some
folly, I would let him run the risk. If swindlers went after him at gambling, I
would give him over to them so that they could make him their dupe.* I would let
him be
* Moreover, our pupil will not often be caught in this trap—he who is surrounded by
so many entertainments, who was never bored in his life, and who hardly knows what
money is good for. Since the two motives by which one leads children are interest
and vanity, these same two motives are used by courtesans and confidence men to get
hold of them later. When you see their avidity aroused by prizes and rewards, when
you see them at age ten applauded in a public document at school, you see how at
twenty they will be made to leave their purses in a gaming house and their health
in a house of ill fame. It is always a good bet that the most
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EMILE
flattered, fleeced, and robbed by them. And when, having cleaned him out, they
ended by making fun of him, I would further thank them in his presence for lessons
they were so good as to give him. The only traps from which I would carefully
protect him are those of courtesans. The only consideration I would have for him
would be to share all the dangers I let him run and all the affronts I let him
receive. I would endure everything silently without complaint, without reproach,
without ever saying a single word to him about it. And you can be certain that, if
this discretion is well maintained, everything he has seen me suffer for him will
make more of an impression on his heart than what he has suffered himself.
Here I cannot prevent myself from mentioning the false dignity of governors who, in
order stupidly to play wise men, run down their pupils, affect always to treat them
as children, and always distinguish themselves from their pupils in everything they
make them do. Far from thus disheartening your pupils' youthful courage, spare
nothing to lift up their souls; make them your equals in order that they may become
your equals; and if they cannot yet raise themselves up to you, descend to their
level without shame, without scruple. Remember that your honor is no longer in you
but in your pupil. Share his faults in order to correct them. Take on the burden of
his shame in order to efface it. Imitate that brave Roman who, seeing his army flee
and not being able to rally it, turned and fled at the head of his soldiers,
crying, "They do not flee. They follow their captain." 2K Was he dishonored for
that? Far from it. In thus sacrificing his glory, he increased it. The force of
duty and the beauty of virtue attract our approbation in spite of ourselves and
overturn our insane prejudices. If I received a slap in fulfilling my functions
with Emile, far from avenging myself for this slap, I would go everywhere to boast
about it, and I doubt whether there is a man in the world vile enough not to
respect me the more for it.
It is not that the pupil ought to suppose an understanding as limited as his own in
the master and the same facility at letting himself be seduced. This opinion is
good for a child who, knowing how to see nothing and compare nothing, takes
everyone to be on his level and trusts only those who actually know how to get down
to it. But a young man of Emile's age, and as sensible as he is, is not stupid
enough to be thus taken in; and it would not be good if he were taken in. The
confidence he ought to have in his governor is of another kind. It ought to rest on
the authority of reason, on superiority of understanding, on advantages that the
young man is in a condition to know and whose utility to himself he senses. A long
experience has convinced him that he is loved by his guide, that the guide is a
wise and enlightened man who, wishing for his happiness, knows what can procure it
for him. He ought to know that in his own interest it is proper to listen to his
guide's advice. Now, if the master were to let himself be deceived like the dis-
learned member of his class will be the biggest gambler and the biggest debauche.
It is true that means which were not used in childhood are not subject to the same
abuse in youth. But one ought to remember that here my constant maxim is always to
take a thing at its worst. I seek first to prevent the vice, and then I assume it
in order to remedy it.
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ciple, he would lose the right to exact deference and to give his disciple lessons.
Still less should the latter suppose that the master purposely lets him be ensnared
and sets traps for his simplicity. What then must be done to avoid both of these
difficulties at once? That which is best and most natural: be simple and true like
him, warn him of the perils to which he is exposed, and show them to him clearly
and sensibly, but without exaggeration, ill humor, pedantic display, and, above
all, without giving him your advice as an order until it has become one and this
imperious tone is absolutely necessary. Is he obstinate after that, as he will very
often be? Then say nothing more to him; leave him free; follow him; imitate him,
and do it gaily and frankly. Let yourself go, enjoy yourself as much as he does, if
it is possible. If the consequences become too great, you are always there to put a
stop to them. And meanwhile, will not the young man, witnessing your foresight and
your kindness, be at once greatly struck by the one and touched by the other? All
his faults are so many bonds he provides you for restraining him in case of need.
What here constitutes the master's greatest art is to provide occasions and to
manage exhortations in such a way that he knows in advance when the young man will
yield and when he will be obstinate. Thus the master can surround him on all sides
with the lessons of experience without ever exposing him to too great dangers.
Warn him about his mistakes before he falls into them. When he has fallen into
them, do not reproach him for them. You would only inflame his amour-propre and
make it rebel. A lesson that causes revolt is of no profit. I know of nothing more
inept than the phrase: "I told you so!" The best means of making him remember what
one has told him is to appear to have forgotten it. Instead of reproaching him when
you see him ashamed of not having believed you, gently efface this humiliation with
good words. He will surely be more fond of you when he sees that you forget
yourself for him, and that, instead of finishing the job of crushing him, you
console him. But if you add reproaches to his sorrow, he will conceive a hatred of
you and will make it a law unto himself not to listen to you anymore, as though to
prove to you that he does not agree with you about the importance of your advice.
The manner of your consolations can provide further instruction for him,
instruction so much the more useful in that he will not be on his guard against it.
In saying to him, for example, that countless others make the same mistakes, you do
not exactly fill the bill for him; you correct him by appearing only to pity him;
for, to him who believes he is worth more than other men, it is a most mortifying
excuse to be consoled by their example. It is to suggest that the most he can
pretend to is that they be not worth more than he is.
The time of mistakes is the time of fables. By censuring the guilty party under an
alien mask, one instructs him without offending him: and he understands then, from
the truth which he applies to himself, that the apologue is not a lie. The child
who has never been deceived by praise understands nothing of the fable I examined
earlier. But the giddy young man who has just been the dupe of a flatterer
conceives
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EMILE
marvelously that the crow was only a fool. Thus, from a fact he draws a maxim; and
by means of the fable the experience he would soon have forgotten is imprinted on
his judgment. There is no moral knowledge which cannot be acquired by another's or
one's own experience. In the cases where this experience is dangerous, instead of
having it oneself, one draws one's lesson from the story. When the test is
inconsequential, it is good that the young man remain exposed to it. Then, by means
of the apologue, one frames the particular cases known to him in the form of
maxims.
I do not mean, however, that these maxims ought to be elaborated or even stated.
Nothing is so vain or so ill conceived as the moral with which most fables end—as
if this moral were not or should not be understood in the fable itself in such a
way as to be palpable to the reader. Why, then, by adding this moral at the end,
take from him the pleasure of finding it on his own? Talent at instruction consists
in making the disciple enjoy the instruction. But in order for him to enjoy it, his
mind must not remain so passive at everything you tell him that he has absolutely
nothing to do in order to understand you. The master's amour-propre must always
leave some hold for the disciple's; he must be able to say to himself, "I conceive,
I discern, I act, I learn." One of the things that makes the Pantaloon 2I) of
Italian comedy a bore is the care he always takes to interpret to the pit
platitudes which are only too well understood. I do not want a governor to be
Pantaloon; still less do I want him to be an author. One must always make oneself
understood, but one must not always say everything. He who says everything says
little, for finally he is no longer listened to. What is the meaning of those four
verses La Fontaine adds to the fable of the frog who puffs himself up? Is he afraid
he will not be understood? 30 Does this great painter need to write names beneath
the objects he paints? Far from thereby generalizing his moral, he particularizes
it, he restricts it in a way to the examples cited and prevents its being applied
to others. Before putting this inimitable author's fables into a young man's hands,
I would want to cut out all these conclusions where La Fontaine makes an effort to
explain what he has just said no less clearly than agreeably. If your pupil
understands the fable only with the help of the explanation, be sure that he will
not understand it even in that way.
It would also be important to give these fables an order that is more didactic and
more in conformity with the progress of the young adolescent's sentiments and
understanding. Can one conceive of anything less reasonable than following exactly
the numerical order of the book without regard to need or occasion? First the crow,
then the cicada, then the frog, then the two mules, etc. These two mules rankle me,
because I remember having seen a child—who was being raised to become a financier,
and whom they were making giddy with the function he was going to fulfill—read this
fable, learn it, tell it, and retell it hundreds of times without ever drawing from
it the least objection to the trade for which he was destined. Not only have I
never seen children make any solid application of the fables they learned, but
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I have never seen anyone take care to get them to make this application. The
pretext of this study is moral instruction, but the true object of the mother and
the child is only to get a whole gathering to pay attention to him reciting his
fables. So he forgets them all on growing up, when it is a question no longer of
reciting them but of profiting from them. To repeat, it is only men who get
instruction from fables, and now is the time for Emile to begin.
I show from afar—for I also do not want to say everything—the roads deviating from
the right one in order that one may learn to avoid them. I believe that in
following the one I have indicated, your pupil will purchase knowledge of men and
of himself as cheaply as possible, and that you will put him in a position to
contemplate the games of Fortune without envying the fate of its favorites, and to
be satisfied with himself without believing himself to be wiser than others. You
have also begun to make him an actor in order to make him a spectator; you must
finish the job; for from the pit one sees objects as they appear, but from the
stage one sees them as they are. To embrace the whole, one must move back to get
perspective; one must come near to see the details. But what claim has a young man
to admission into the affairs of the world? What right has he to be initiated in
these shadowy mysteries? The interests of his age limit him to affairs of pleasure.
He still disposes only of himself; it is as though he disposed of nothing. Man is
the lowest kind of merchandise; and among our important rights of property that of
the person is always the least of all.
When I see that at the age of the greatest activity young people are limited to
purely speculative studies, and that then without the least experience they are all
of a sudden cast into the world and business, I find that reason no less than
nature is offended, and I am no longer surprised that so few people know how to
take care of themselves. By what bizarre turn of mind are we taught so many useless
things while the art of action is counted for nothing? They claim they form us for
society, and they instruct us as if each of us were going to spend his life in
thinking alone in his cell or treating airy questions with disinterested men. You
believe you are teaching your children how to live by training them in certain
contortions of the body and certain formulas of speech signifying nothing. I, too,
have taught my Emile how to live, for I have taught him how to live with himself
and, in addition, how to earn his bread. But this is not enough. To live in the
world, one must know how to deal with men, one must know the instruments which give
one a hold over them. One must know how to calculate the action and the reaction of
particular interests in civil society and to foresee events so accurately that one
is rarely mistaken in one's undertakings, or at least has chosen the best means for
succeeding. The laws do not permit young people to manage their own business and
dispose of their own goods. But what use to them would be these precautions if up
to the prescribed age they could acquire no experience? They would have gained
nothing by waiting and would be just as new at things at twenty-five as at fifteen.
Doubtless a young man blinded by his ignorance or deceived by his passions must be
prevented from doing harm
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EMILE
to himself. But at any age beneficence is permitted; at any age one can, under a
wise man's direction, protect the unfortunate who need only support.
Nurses and mothers are attached to children by the care they give them. The
exercise of the social virtues brings the love of humanity to the depths of one's
heart. It is in doing good that one becomes good; I know of no practice more
certain. Busy your pupil with all the good actions within his reach. Let the
interest of indigents always be his. Let him assist them not only with his purse
but with his care. Let him serve them, protect them, consecrate his person and his
time to them. Let him be their representative; he will never again in his life
fulfill so noble a function. How many of the oppressed who would never have been
heard will obtain justice when he asks for it on their behalf with that intrepid
firmness given by the practice of virtue, when he forces the doors of the noble and
the rich, when he goes, if necessary, to the foot of the throne to make heard the
voice of the unfortunates to whom all access is closed by their poverty and who are
prevented by fear of being punished for the ills done to them if they even dare to
complain?
But will we make of Emile a knight errant, a redresser of wrongs, a paladin? Will
he go and meddle in public affairs, play the wise man and the defender of the laws
with the nobles, with the magistrates, with the prince, play the solicitor with the
judges and the lawyer with the courts? I know nothing about all that. Terms of
denigration and ridicule change nothing in the nature of things. He will do all
that he knows to be useful and good. He will do nothing more, and he knows that
nothing is useful and good for him which is not suitable to his age. He knows that
his first duty is toward himself, that young people ought to distrust themselves,
be circumspect in their conduct, respectful before older people, reserved and
careful not to talk without purpose, modest in inconsequential things, but hardy in
good deeds and courageous in speaking the truth. Such were those illustrious Romans
who, before being admitted to public offices, spent their youth in prosecuting
crime and defending innocence, without any other interest than that of instructing
themselves in serving justice and protecting good morals.
Emile dislikes both turmoil and quarrels, not only among men *
* But if someone picks a quarrel with him, how will he behave? I answer that he
will never have a quarrel, that he will never lend himself to it enough to have
one. But finally, it will be pursued, who is safe from a slap or from being given
the lie by a bully, a drunk, or a brave scoundrel who, in order to have the
pleasure of killing his man, begins by dishonoring him? That is something else.
Neither the honor nor the life of citizens must be at the mercy of a bully, of a
drunk, or of a brave scoundrel, and one can no more secure oneself from such an
accident than from the fall of a tile. To meet and put up with a slap or being
given the lie has civil effects which no wisdom can anticipate, and for which no
tribunal can avenge the injured party. The insufficiency of the laws, therefore,
gives him back his independence in this. He is then the only magistrate, the only
judge between the offender and himself. He is the only interpreter and minister of
the natural law. He owes himself justice and is the only one who can render it, and
there is no government on earth so mad as to punish him for having done himself
justice in such a case. I do not say that he ought to fight a duel. That is a
folly. I say that he owes himself justice, and that he is the only dispenser of it.
If I were sovereign, I guarantee that, without so many vain edicts against duels,
there would never be either slap or giving of the lie in my states, and that this
would be accomplished by a very simple means in which the tribunals would not mix.
However that may
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but even among animals. Never did he incite two dogs to fight with one another,
never did he get a dog to chase a cat. This spirit of peace is an effect of his
education which, not having fomented amour-propre and a high opinion of himself,
has diverted him from seeking his pleasures in domination and in another's
unhappiness. He suffers when he sees suffering. It is a natural sentiment. A young
man is hardened and takes pleasure at seeing a sensitive being tormented when a
reflection of vanity makes him regard himself as exempt from the same pains as a
result of his wisdom or his superiority. He who has been protected against this
turn of mind could not fall into the vice which is its work. Emile therefore loves
peace. The image of happiness delights him, and when he can contribute to producing
happiness, this is one more means of sharing it. I have not supposed that when he
sees unhappy men, he would have only that sterile and cruel pity for them which is
satisfied with pitying ills it can cure. His active beneficence soon gives him
understanding which with a harder heart he would not have acquired or would have
acquired much later. If he sees discord reigning among his comrades, he seeks to
reconcile them; if he sees men afflicted, he informs himself as to the subject of
their suffering; if he sees two men who hate each other, he wants to know the cause
of their enmity; if he sees an oppressed man groaning under the vexations of the
powerful and the rich, he finds out what maneuvers are used to cover over those
vexations; and, with the interest he takes in all men who are miserable, the means
of ending their ills are never indifferent to him. What, then, do we have to do in
order to take advantage of those dispositions in a way suitable to his age? We have
to regulate his concern and his knowledge and employ his zeal to increase them.
I do not tire of repeating it: put all the lessons of young people in actions
rather than in speeches. Let them learn nothing in books which experience can teach
them. What an extravagant project it is to train them in speaking without their
having a subject about which to say anything; to believe that on the benches of a
college they can be made to feel the energy of the language of the passions and all
the force of the art of persuasion without interest in persuading anyone of
anything! All the precepts of rhetoric seem to be only pure verbiage to whoever
does not sense their use for his profit. Of what import is it to a schoolboy to
know how Hannibal went about convincing his soldiers to cross the Alps? If, in
place of these magnificent harangues, you told him how he ought to go about getting
his principal to give him a vacation, be sure that he would be more attentive to
your rules.
If I wanted to teach rhetoric to a young man whose passions all were already
developed, I would constantly present him with objects fit to delight those
passions, and I would examine with him what language he ought to use with other men
in order to engage them to favor his desires. But my Emile is not in so
advantageous a situation for the oratorical art. Limited almost solely to what is
physically necessary, he
be, Emile knows the justice he owes to himself in such a case and the example he
owes to the security of men of honor. The firmest of men is not in a position to
prevent someone from insulting him, but he is in a position to prevent anyone's
boasting for long of having insulted him.
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has less need of others than others have of him; and having nothing to ask of them
for himself, what he wants to persuade them of does not touch him enough to move
him excessively. It follows from this that in general he ought to have a language
which is simple and hardly at all figurative. Ordinarily he speaks literally and
solely to be understood. His speech is little given to sententiousness, because he
has not learned to generalize his ideas; he uses few images, because he is rarely
passionate.
It is not the case, however, that he is completely phlegmatic and cold. Neither his
age nor his morals nor his tastes permit it. In the fire of adolescence the
vivifying spirits, retained and distilled in his blood, bring to his young heart a
warmth which shines forth in his glance, which is sensed in his speech, which is
visible in his actions. His language has gained expression and sometimes vehemence.
The noble sentiment inspiring him gives him force and elevation. Suffused with the
tender love of humanity, he transmits the emotions of his soul in speaking. His
generous frankness has an indefinable something about it that is more enchanting
than the artificial eloquence of others; or, rather, he alone is truly eloquent
since he has only to show what he feels to communicate it to those who hear him.
The more I think about it, the more I find that in thus putting beneficence in
action and drawing from our greater or lesser successes reflections on their
causes, there is little useful knowledge which cannot be cultivated in a young
man's mind; in this way, along with all the true learning that can be acquired in
colleges, he will acquire another science still more important, which is the
application of these attainments to the uses of life. Since he takes so much
interest in his fellows, it is impossible that he not learn early to weigh and
appraise their actions, their tastes, and their pleasures and to evaluate what can
contribute to or detract from men's happiness more accurately than can those who
are interested in no one and never do anything for others. Those who never deal
with anything other than their own affairs are too passionate to judge things
soundly. Relating everything to themselves alone and regulating their ideas of good
and bad according to their own interest, they fill their minds with countless
ridiculous prejudices, and in everything that hampers their slightest advantage,
they immediately see the overturning of the whole universe.
Let us extend amour-propre to other beings. We shall transform it into a virtue,
and there is no man's heart in which this virtue does not have its root. The less
the object of our care is immediately involved with us, the less the illusion of
particular interest is to be feared. The more one generalizes this interest, the
more it becomes equitable, and the love of mankind is nothing other than the love
of justice. Do we, then, want Emile to love the truth; do we want him to know it?
In his activities let us always keep him at a distance from himself. The more his
cares are consecrated to the happiness of others, the more they will be enlightened
and wise and the less he will deceived about what is good or bad. But let us never
tolerate in him a blind preference founded solely on consideration of persons or on
unjust bias. And why would he hurt one to serve another? It is of little importance
to him
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who gets a greater share of happiness provided that it contributes to the greatest
happiness of all. This is the wise man's first interest after his private interest,
for each is part of his species and not of another individual.31
To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness, it must, therefore, be generalized
and extended to the whole of mankind. Then one yields to it only insofar as it
accords with justice, because of all the virtues justice is the one that
contributes most to the common good of men. For the sake of reason, for the sake of
love of ourselves, we must have pity for our species still more than for our
neighbor, and pity for the wicked is a very great cruelty to men.
Moreover, it must be remembered that all these means by which I take my pupil out
of himself, always have, nevertheless, a direct relation to him; for not only does
he get an inner enjoyment from them, but also, in making him beneficent for the
profit of others, I work for his own instruction.
I have first given the means, and now I show the effect. What great views I see
settling little by little in his head! What sublime sentiments stifle the germ of
the petty passions in his heart! What judicial clarity, what accuracy of reason I
see forming in him, as a result of the cultivation of his inclinations, of the
experience which concentrates the wishes of a great soul within the narrow limit of
the possible and makes a man who is superior to others and, unable to raise them to
his level, is capable of lowering himself to theirs! The true principles of the
just, the true models of the beautiful, all the moral relations of beings, all the
ideas of order are imprinted on his understanding. He sees the place of each thing
and the cause which removes it from its place; he sees what can do good and what
stands in its way. Without having experienced the human passions, he knows their
illusions and their effects.
I go forward, attracted by the force of things but without gaining credibility in
the judgment of my readers. For a long while they have seen me in the land of
chimeras. I always see them in the land of prejudices. In separating myself so far
from vulgar opinions I do not cease keeping them present in my mind. I examine
them, I meditate on them, neither to follow them nor to flee them but to weigh them
in the scale of reasoning. Every time that this reasoning forces me to separate
myself from those opinions, I have learned from experience to take it for granted
that my readers will not imitate me. I know that they persist in imagining only
what they see; and therefore they will take the young man whom I evoke to be an
imaginary and fantastic being because he differs from those with whom they compare
him. They do not stop to think that he must certainly differ from these young men,
since he is raised quite differently, affected by quite contrary sentiments, and
instructed quite otherwise from them; indeed, it would be much more surprising if
he were to resemble them than to be such as I suppose him. This is not the man of
man; it is the man of nature. Assuredly he should be very alien to their eyes.
In beginning this work, I supposed nothing that everyone cannot observe just as I
do, because there is a point—the birth of man—from
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EMILE
which we all equally begin. But the more we go forward, I to cultivate nature and
you to deprave it, the farther we get from each other. My pupil at the age of six
differed little from yours, whom you had not had the time to disfigure. Now they
are no longer similar in anything; and the age of maturity, which he is
approaching, ought to show that he is of an absolutely different kind, if I have
not wasted all my care. The extent of their attainments is perhaps fairly equal on
both sides; but the things they have attained bear no resemblance. You are
surprised to find in the one sublime sentiments of which the others do not have the
slightest germ. But consider also that the latter are already all philosophers and
theologians before Emile knows what philosophy is and has even heard of God.
If, then, someone came and said to me, "Nothing of what you suppose exists. Young
people are not made that way. They have such or such a passion. They do this or
that," it would be as if he were to deny that there was ever a big pear tree
because one only sees dwarf pear trees in our gardens.
I beg these judges who are so quick to censure to consider that I know what they
are saying here just as well as they do, that I have probably reflected on it
longer, and that as I have no interest in foisting anything on them, I have the
right to demand that they at least take the time to seek out where I am mistaken.
Let them examine carefully the constitution of man and follow the first
developments of the heart in various circumstances in order to see how much one
individual can differ from another due to the force of education; next let them
compare my education with the effects I attribute to it, and then say where I have
badly reasoned. I shall have nothing to respond.
What makes me more assertive—and, I believe, more to be excused for being so—is
that, instead of yielding to the systematic spirit, I grant as little as possible
to reasoning and I trust only observation. I found myself not on what I have
imagined but on what I have seen. It is true that I have not restricted my
experience to the compass of a city's walls or to a single class of people. But
after having compared as many ranks and peoples as I could see in a life spent
observing them, I have eliminated as artificial what belonged to one people and not
to another, to one station and not to another, and have regarded as incontestably
belonging to man only what was common to all, at whatever age, in whatever rank,
and in whatever nation.
Now if in accordance with this method you follow a young man from childhood who has
not received a particular form and who depends as little as possible on the
authority and opinion of others, whom do you think he will most resemble—my pupil
or yours? This, it seems to me, is the question which must be resolved in order to
know whether I have gone astray.
Man does not easily begin to think. But as soon as he begins, he never stops.
Whoever has thought will always think, and once the understanding is practiced at
reflection, it can no longer stay at rest. It might, therefore, be believed that I
do too much or too little, that the human mind is not naturally so quick to open
itself, and that, after hav-
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ing given it faculties it does not possess, I keep it inscribed for too long in a
circle of ideas it should have gone beyond.
But consider, in the first place, that although I want to form the man of nature,
the object is not, for all that, to make him a savage and to relegate him to the
depths of the woods. It suffices that, enclosed in a social whirlpool, he not let
himself get carried away by either the passions or the opinions of men, that he see
with his eyes, that he feel with his heart, that no authority govern him beyond
that of his own reason. In this position it is clear that the multitude of objects
striking him, the frequent sentiments affecting him, and the various means of
providing for his real needs are all going to give him many ideas that he would
never have had or that he would have acquired more slowly. The progress natural to
the mind is accelerated but not upset. The same man who ought to remain stupid in
the forests ought to become reasonable and sensible in the cities when he is a
simple spectator there. Nothing is more fit to make a man wise than follies that
are seen without being shared; and even he who shares them is still instructed,
provided he is not their dupe and does not bring to them the error of men who
commit them.
Consider also that since we are limited by our faculties to things which can be
sensed, we provide almost no hold for abstract notions of philosophy and purely
intellectual ideas. To arrive at them we must either separate ourselves from the
body—to which we are so strongly attached—or make a gradual and slow climb from
object to object, or, finally, clear the gap rapidly and almost at a leap, by a
giant step upward of which childhood is not capable and for which even men need
many rungs especially made for them. The first abstract idea is the first of these
rungs, but I have great difficulty in seeing how anyone got it into his head to
construct it.
The incomprehensible Being who embraces everything, who gives motion to the world
and forms the whole system of beings, is neither visible to our eyes nor palpable
to our hands; He escapes all our senses. The work is revealed, but the worker is
hidden. It is no small undertaking to know even that He exists; and when we have
succeeded at that and ask ourselves, "What is He? Where is He?" our mind is
confused and goes astray, and we no longer know what to think.
Locke wants one to begin by the study of spirits and later go on to that of bodies.
This method is that of superstition, of prejudices, and of error. It is not that of
reason nor even of nature in its proper order. It is to stop up our eyes in order
to learn to see. One must have studied bodies for a long time in order to form for
oneself a true notion of spirits and to suspect that they exist. The opposite order
serves only to establish materialism.32
Since our senses are the first instruments of our knowledge, corporeal and sensible
beings are the only ones of which we immediately have an idea. The word spirit has
no sense for anyone who has not philosophized. To the people and to children, a
spirit is only a body. Do they not imagine spirits who cry out, speak, flutter, and
make noise? Now, it will be granted me that spirits which have arms and tongues
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EMILE
bear a strong resemblance to bodies. This is why all the peoples of the world,
without excepting the Jews, have made corporeal gods for themselves. We ourselves,
with our terms spirit, trinity, persons, are for the most part veritable
anthropomorphites. I admit that we are taught to say that God is everywhere, but we
also believe that air is everywhere, at least in our atmosphere. And in its origin
the word spirit itself signifies only breath and wind. As soon as people are
accustomed to say words without understanding them, it is easy to make them say
whatever one wants.
The sentiment of our action on other bodies must at first have made us believe that
when they acted on us they did so in a manner similar to the way we acted on them.
Thus man began by animating all the beings whose action he felt. Not only did he
feel himself less strong than most of these beings, but for want of knowing the
limits of their power, he assumed it to be unlimited, and he construed them to be
gods as soon as he construed them to be bodies. During the first ages men were
frightened of everything and saw nothing dead in nature. The idea of matter was
formed no less slowly in them than that of spirit, since the former idea is an
abstraction itself. They thus filled the universe with gods which could be sensed.
Stars, winds, mountains, rivers, trees, cities, even houses, each had its soul, its
god, its life. The teraphim of Laban,33 the manitous of savages,34 the fetishes of
Negroes, all the works of nature and of men, were the first divinities of mortals.
Polytheism was their first religion, and idolatry their first form of worship. They
were able to recognize a single god only when, generalizing their ideas more and
more, they were in a condition to ascend to a first cause, to bring together the
total system of beings under a single idea, and to give a sense to the word
substance, which is at bottom the greatest of abstractions. Every child who
believes in God is, therefore, necessarily an idolator or at least an
anthropomorphite. And once the imagination has seen God, it is very rare that the
understanding conceives Him. This is precisely the error to which Locke's order
leads.
Once the abstract idea of substance has—I know not how—been arrived at, one sees
that, in order to admit of only one substance, this substance must be assumed to
have incompatible qualities, such as thought and extension, which are mutually
exclusive since one is essentially divisible and the other excludes all
divisibility. One conceives, moreover, that thought or, if you wish, sentiment is a
primary quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs, and that the
same is the case for extension in relation to its substance. From this one
concludes that beings that lose one of these qualities lose the substance to which
it belongs; that consequently death is only a separation of substances; and that
beings in which these two qualities are joined are composed of the two substances
to which these two qualities belong.35
Now just consider what a distance still remains between the notion of two
substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible idea of the
action of our soul on our body and the idea of the action of God on all beings! The
ideas of creation, annihilation, ubiquity, eternity, omnipotence, the idea of the
divine attributes—all these ideas that are seen to be as confused and obscure as
they really
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are by so few men, but that are in no way obscure for the people because they do
not comprehend them at all—how will these ideas be presented in all their force—
that is to say, in all their obscurity—to young minds still busy with the first
operations of the senses and able to conceive only what they touch? It is in vain
that the abysses of the infinite are open all around us. A child does not know
enough to be terrified by them; his weak eyes cannot probe their depths. Everything
is infinite for children. They do not know how to set limits to anything— not
because they make the measure very long, but because their understanding is short.
I have even noticed that they put the infinite less beyond than below the
dimensions known to them. They will estimate an immense space far more by their
feet than by their eyes. It will extend for them, not farther than they can see,
but farther than they can go. If one speaks to them of God's power, they will
estimate Him to be almost as strong as their father. Since in everything their
knowledge is the measure of the possible, they always judge everything of which
they are told to be less than that which they know. Such are the judgments natural
to ignorance and weakness of mind. Ajax was afraid to pit himself against Achilles
and yet defied Jupiter to combat, because he knew Achilles and did not know
Jupiter. A Swiss peasant who believed himself the richest of men, and to whom
someone tried to explain what a king is, asked proudly whether the king could
really have a hundred cows on the mountain.
I foresee how many readers will be surprised at seeing me trace the whole first age
of my pupil without speaking to him of religion. At fifteen he did not know whether
he had a soul. And perhaps at eighteen it is not yet time for him to learn it; for
if he learns it sooner than he ought, he runs the risk of never knowing it.
If I had to depict sorry stupidity, I would depict a pedant teaching the catechism
to children. If I wanted to make a child go mad, I would oblige him to explain what
he says in saying his catechism. Someone will object to me that since most of the
dogmas of Christianity are mysteries, to wait for the human mind to be capable of
having a conception of them is not to wait for the child to be a man but to wait
for the man to exist no more. To that I answer, in the first place, that there are
mysteries it is impossible for man not only to conceive but to believe, and that I
do not see what is gained by teaching them to children, unless it be that they
learn how to lie early. I say, moreover, that, to accept the mysteries, one must at
least comprehend that they are incomprehensible, and children are not even capable
of this conception. At the age when everything is mystery, there are no mysteries
strictly speaking.
You must believe in God to be saved. This dogma badly understood is the principle
of sanguinary intolerance and the cause of all those vain instructions that strike
a fatal blow to human reason in accustoming it to satisfy itself with words.
Doubtless there is not a moment to lose in order to merit eternal salvation. But if
in order to obtain it, it is enough to repeat certain words, I do not see what
prevents us from peopling heaven with starlings and magpies just as well as with
children.
The obligation to believe assumes the possibility of doing so. The
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philosopher who does not believe is wrong, because he uses badly the reason he has
cultivated and because he is in a position to understand the truths he rejects. But
what does the child who professes the Christian religion believe? What he has a
conception of; and he has a conception of so little of what he is made to say that,
if you say to him the opposite, he will adopt it just as gladly. The faith of
children and of many men is a question of geography. Are they to be recompensed for
being born in Rome rather than in Mecca? One is told that Mohammed is God's
prophet, and he says that Mohammed is God's prophet. The other is told that
Mohammed is a deceiver, and he says that Mohammed is a deceiver. Each of the two
would have affirmed what the other affirms if they had happened to be transposed.
Can one proceed from two such similar dispositions to send one to paradise and the
other to hell? When a child says that he believes in God, it is not in God that he
believes, it is in Peter or James who tell him that there is something called God.
And he believes after the fashion of Euripides.
Oh Jupiter! For other than the name I know nothing of you. *
We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of eternal
happiness. The Catholics believe the same thing of all children who have been
baptized, even if they have never heard of God. There are, therefore, cases in
which one can be saved without believing in God, and these cases have their place
when the human mind is incapable—as in childhood or in madness—of the operations
neces-ry to recognize the divinity. The whole difference I see here between you and
me is that you claim that children have this capacity at seven, and I do not even
accord it to them at fifteen. Whether I am wrong or right, it is a question here
not of an article of faith but of a simple observation of natural history.
By the same principle it is clear that a man who has come to old age without
believing in God will not for that be deprived of his presence in the other life if
his blindness was not voluntary; and I say that it is not always voluntary. You
agree in the case of madmen whom an illness deprives of their spiritual faculties
but not of their quality of being men or, consequently, of their right to the
benefits of their Creator. Why, therefore, do you not also agree in the case of
those who have been sequestered from all society from their childhood and have led
an absolutely savage life, deprived of the enlightenment which is acquired only in
commerce with men;t for it is a demonstrated impossibility that such a savage could
ever raise his reflections up to the knowledge of the true God. Reason tells us
that a man can be punished only for the mistakes of his will, and that an
invincible ignorance could not be imputed to crime. From this it follows that
before the
* Plutarch, Treatise on Love, Amyot trans. It is thus that the tragedy Menalippe
began at first; but the clamor of the people of Athens forced Euripides to change
this beginning.80
t On the natural state of the human mind and on the slowness of its progress, see
the first part of the Discourse on Inequality.
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bar of eternal justice every man who would believe if he had the necessary
enlightenment is reputed to believe, and that the only unbelievers who will be
punished are those whose heart closes itself to the truth.
Let us refrain from proclaiming the truth to those who are not in a condition to
understand it, for to do this is to want to substitute error for truth. It would be
better to have no idea of the divinity than to have ideas of it that are base,
fantastic, insulting, or unworthy. It is a lesser evil to be unaware of the
divinity than to offend it. "I would rather," says the good Plutarch, "have it
believed that there is no Plutarch in the world than have it said that Plutarch is
unjust, envious, jealous, and such a tyrant that he demands more than he grants the
power to do." 37
The great evil of the deformed images of the divinity which are drawn in the minds
of children is that they remain there all their lives; when the children become
men, they no longer conceive of any other God than that of children. In Switzerland
I have seen a good and pious mother of a family so convinced of this maxim that she
did not want to instruct her son in religion during his first years, for fear that
he would be satisfied with this crude instruction and would neglect a better one in
the age of reason. This child never heard God spoken of except with devotion and
reverence; and when he himself wanted to speak of Him, silence was imposed, as
though the subject were too sublime and too great for him. This reserve excited his
curiosity, and his amour-propre longed for the moment of knowing this mystery which
was being hidden from him with such care. The less one spoke to him of God, the
less he himself was allowed to speak of Him, the more he was preoccupied by Him.
This child saw God everywhere, and what I would be afraid of, if this air of
mystery were inopportunely affected, is that one might influence a young man's
imagination too much, thereby troubling his brain and finally making a fanatic of
him rather than a believer.
But let us fear nothing of the kind for my Emile, who constantly refuses his
attention to everything beyond his reach and listens to things he does not
understand with the most profound indifference. There are so many things about
which he is accustomed to say, "This is not within my competence," that one more
hardly embarrasses him. And when he begins to worry about these great questions, it
is not because he has heard them propounded; it is when the progress of his
enlightenment leads his researches in that direction.
We have seen by what path the cultivated human mind approaches these mysteries, and
I will gladly agree that even in the bosom of society it does not naturally reach
them except at a more advanced age. But since in this same society there are
inevitable causes by which the progress of the passions is accelerated, if one did
not similarly accelerate the progress of the enlightenment which serves to regulate
these passions, then one would truly depart from the order of nature, and the
equilibrium would be broken. When one cannot moderate the too rapid development of
one aspect, it is necessary to manage with the same rapidity the development of the
others which ought to correspond to it. In this way the order will not be inverted,
what ought to go
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EMILE
together will not be separated, and man, whole at every moment of his life, will
not have reached one stage of development with respect to one of his faculties
while he remains at another stage with respect to the rest.
What a difficulty I see arising here, a difficulty all the greater for being less
in things than in the pusillanimity of those who do not dare to resolve it! Let us
begin at least by daring to propound it. A child has to be raised in his father's
religion. He is always given powerful proofs that this religion, such as it is, is
the only true one, that all the others are only folly and absurdity. The strength
of the arguments on this point depends absolutely on the country where they are
propounded. Let a Turk who finds Christianity so ridiculous at Constantinople go
and see how they think of Mohammedanism at Paris! It is especially in matters of
religion that opinion triumphs. But we who pretend to shake off the yoke of opinion
in everything, we who want to grant nothing to authority, we who want to teach
nothing to our Emile which he could not learn by himself in every country, in what
religion shall we raise him? To what sect shall we join the man of nature? The
answer is quite simple, it seems to me. We shall join him to neither this one nor
that one, but we shall put him in a position to choose the one to which the best
use of his reason ought to lead him.
Incedo per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso.88
It makes no difference. Zeal and good faith have taken the place of prudence for me
up to now. I hope these guarantors will not abandon me in time of need. Readers, do
not fear from me precautions unworthy of a friend of the truth. I shall never
forget my motto.39 But it is only too permissible for me to distrust my judgments.
Instead of telling you here on my own what I think, I shall tell you what a man
more worthy than I thought. I guarantee the truth of the facts which are going to
be reported. They really happened to the author of the paper I am going to
transcribe. It is up to you to see if useful reflections can be drawn from it about
the subject with which it deals. I am not propounding to you the sentiment of
another or my own as a rule. I am offering it to you for examination.40
"Thirty years ago in an Italian city a young expatriate found himself reduced to
utter destitution. He was born a Calvinist, but as a consequence of a giddy
escapade he found himself a fugitive without resources in a foreign land, and he
changed his religion in order to have bread. There was in this city an almshouse
for proselytes. He was admitted to it. In instructing him there about the religious
controversy, they gave him doubts he had not had and taught him evils of which he
had been ignorant. He heard new dogmas; he saw morals that were still newer to him.
He saw them and almost became their victim. He wanted to flee; they locked him up.
He complained; he was punished for his complaints. At the mercy of his tyrants, he
saw himself treated as a criminal for not wanting to give way to crime. Those who
know how much the first taste of violence and injustice arouses a young
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EMILE
heart without experience will be able to picture the condition of his own heart.
Tears of rage flowed from his eyes; indignation choked him. He implored heaven and
men; he confided in everyone and was listened to by no one. He saw only vile
domestics subjected to the infamous person who outraged him, or accomplices of the
same crime who jeered at his resistance and urged him to imitate them. He would
have been lost were it not for a decent ecclesiastic who came to the alms-house on
some business and whom he found the means to consult in secret. The ecclesiastic
was poor and needed everyone; but the oppressed lad had even more need of him; and
the ecclesiastic did not hesitate to assist the boy's escape, at the risk of making
a dangerous enemy for himself.
"Having escaped from vice only to return to indigence, the young man struggled
against his destiny without success. For a moment he believed himself above it. At
the first glimmer of fortune his ills and his protector were forgotten. He was soon
punished for this ingratitude. All his hopes vanished. Vain was the advantage of
his youth; his ideas, absorbed from novels, spoiled everything. Having neither
enough talent nor enough adroitness to get ahead easily, and knowing neither how to
be moderate nor how to be wicked, he aspired to so many things that he was unable
to achieve anything. Fallen back into his former distress, without bread, without
shelter, ready to die of hunger, he was reminded of his benefactor.
"He returns there, finds him, and is well received by him. The sight of the lad
recalls to the ecclesiastic a good deed he had done; the soul always rejoices in
such a memory. This man was naturally humane and compassionate. He felt the
sufferings of others by his own, and well-being had not hardened his heart. Finally
the lessons of wisdom and an enlightened virtue had strengthened his good nature.
He greets the young man, seeks lodging for him, and gives him a recommendation. He
shares with him his provisions for the necessities, hardly sufficient for two. He
does more: he instructs the lad, consoles him, teaches him the difficult art of
patiently bearing adversity. Prejudiced people, is it from a priest, is it in
Italy, that you would have hoped for all that?
"This decent ecclesiastic was a poor Savoyard vicar whom a youthful adventure had
put in disfavor with his bishop, and who had crossed the mountains to seek the
resources lacking to him in his own country. He was neither unintelligent nor
unlettered and, as he had an interesting face, he had found protectors who procured
him a place raising the son of a prince's minister. He preferred poverty to
dependence and was ignorant of how to behave with nobles. He did not stay long with
this one; but in leaving him, he did not lose his esteem, and since the
ecclesiastic lived wisely and made himself loved by everyone, he cherished the
illusion that he would return to his bishop's good graces and obtain some little
parish in the mountains where he might spend the rest of his days. Such was the
furthest goal of his ambition.
"A natural inclination interested him in the young fugitive and made him examine
him carefully. He saw that ill fortune had already dried up the young man's heart,
that opprobrium and contempt had beaten down his courage, and that his pride,
changed into bitter spite, took
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men's injustice and hardness only as proof of the viciousness of their nature and
the chimerical character of virtue. He had seen that religion served only as the
mask of interest and sacred worship only as the safeguard of hypocrisy. He had
observed the subtleties of vain disputes where paradise and hell were made the
prize of word games. He had seen the sublime original ideas of the divinity
disfigured by the fantastic imaginations of men; and finding that in order to
believe in God he had to renounce the judgment he had received from Him, he held in
the same disdain our ridiculous reveries and the object to which we apply them.
Without knowing anything of what is, without imagining anything about the
generation of things, he wallowed in his stupid ignorance with a profound contempt
for all those who thought they knew more about these things than he did.
"The forgetting of all religion leads to the forgetting of the duties of man. This
progress was already more than half accomplished in the libertine's heart.
Nevertheless, he was not an ill-born child. But incredulity and poverty, stifling
his nature little by little, were leading him rapidly to his destruction and
heading him toward the morals of a tramp and the morality of an atheist.
"The evil was almost inevitable but was not absolutely consummated. The young man
had some knowledge, and his education had not been neglected. He was at that happy
age when the blood is in fermentation and begins to heat up the soul without
enslaving it to the furies of the senses. His soul still had all of its vigor. A
native shame and a timid character took the place of constraint and prolonged for
him this period in which you keep your pupil with so much care. The odious example
of brutal depravity and vice without charm, far from animating his imagination, had
deadened it. For a long time disgust took the place of virtue for him in preserving
his innocence—an innocence that was to succumb only to gentler seductions.
"The ecclesiastic saw the danger and the resources. The difficulties did not
dishearten him. He took pleasure in his work. He resolved to complete it and to
render to virtue the victim he had snatched from infamy. He made long-range plans
for the execution of his project. The beauty of the motive animated his courage and
inspired him with means worthy of his zeal. Whatever the success, he was sure of
not wasting his time. One always succeeds when one only wishes to do good.
"The first thing he did was to gain the proselyte's confidence by not selling him
his benefactions, by not pestering him, by not preaching to him, by always putting
himself within his reach, by making himself small in order to be his proselyte's
equal. It was, it seems to me, a rather touching spectacle to see a grave man
become a rascal's comrade and to see virtue lend itself to the tone of license in
order to triumph over it more surely. When the giddy boy came to make his mad
confidences and unbosom himself, the priest listened to him and put him at his
ease. Without approving evil, the priest was interested in everything. Never did a
tactless censure come to stop the boy's chatter and contract his heart. The
pleasure which the boy believed the priest took in listening to him increased that
which he took in saying everything.
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EMILE
Thus he made his general confession without thinking he was confessing anything.
"After having studied the boy's sentiments and his character well, the priest saw
clearly that although he was not ignorant for his age, he had forgotten everything
it was important for him to know; and that the opprobrium to which fortune had
reduced the boy stifled every true sentiment of good and evil in him. There is a
degree of degradation which takes away life from the soul, and the inner voice
cannot make itself heard to someone who thinks only of feeding himself. To protect
the unfortunate young fellow from this moral death to which he was so near, the
priest began by awakening amour-propre and self-esteem in him. He showed him a
happier future in the good employment of his talents. He reanimated a generous
ardor in his heart by the account of others' noble deeds. In making the boy admire
those who had performed them, the priest gave him the desire to perform like deeds.
To detach him gradually from his idle and vagrant life, he had the boy make
extracts from selected books; and, feigning to need these extracts, he fed the
noble sentiment of gratitude in him. He instructed him indirectly by these books.
He made the boy regain a good enough opinion of himself so as not to believe he was
a being useless for anything good and so as not to want any longer to make himself
contemptible in his own eyes.
"A bagatelle will provide a basis for judging the art this beneficent man used for
gradually lifting his young disciple's heart above baseness without appearing to
think of instruction. The ecclesiastic had a probity so well recognized and a
discernment so sure that many persons preferred to have their alms distributed by
his hand rather than by that of the rich city cures. One day, when he had been
given some money to pass out to the poor, the youth, claiming his right as a poor
man, was so craven as to ask him for some of it. 'No,' the priest said, 'we are
brothers; you are part of me, and I ought not to touch this deposit for my use.'
Then he gave the youth from his own money as much as he had asked for. Lessons of
this kind are rarely lost on the hearts of young people who are not completely
corrupted.
"I am tired of speaking in the third person. And the effort is quite superfluous,
for you are well aware, dear fellow citizen, that this unhappy fugitive is myself.
I believe myself far enough from the disorders of my youth to dare to admit them,
and the hand which drew me away from these disorders merits that, at the expense of
a bit of shame, I render at least some honor to his benefactions.
"What struck me the most was seeing in my worthy master's private life virtue
without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech that was always straight and
simple, and conduct always in conformity with this speech. I did not see him
worrying whether those he aided went to vespers, whether they confessed often,
whether they fasted on the prescribed days, whether they kept meatless days, or
imposing other similar conditions on them—conditions which must be fulfilled if one
is to hope for any assistance from the devout, even if one is dying of poverty.
"Encouraged by these observations—far from displaying to him an
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affectation of the new convert's zeal—I did not do much to hide from him my ways of
thinking and did not see him any the more scandalized by them. Sometimes I could
have said to myself, 'He passes over my indifference for the worship I have
embraced for the sake of the indifference he also sees in me for the worship in
which I was born. He knows that my disdain is no longer a question of party.' But
what was I to think when I heard him sometimes approve dogmas contrary to those of
the Roman Church and show little esteem for all its ceremonies? I would have
believed him a disguised Protestant if I had observed him to be less faithful to
these very practices by which he seemed to set little store. But knowing that he
acquitted himself of his priestly duties as punctiliously when there were no
witnesses as in the public eye, I no longer knew how to judge these contradictions.
With the exception of the failing which had formerly brought on his disgrace, and
of which he was not too well corrected, his life was exemplary, his morals were
irreproachable, his speech was decent and judicious. In living with him in the
greatest intimacy I learned to respect him more every day; and as so much goodness
had entirely won my heart, I was waiting with agitated curiosity for the moment
when I would learn the principle on which he founded the uniformity of so singular
a life.
"That moment did not come so soon. Before opening himself to his disciple, he made
an effort to ensure the germination of the seeds of reason and goodness he was
sowing in his disciple's soul. What was most difficult to destroy in me was a proud
misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and happy of the world, as
though they were such at my expense and their pretended happiness had been usurped
from mine. The mad vanity of youth, which revolts against humiliation, gave me only
too much of an inclination to that angry humor, and the amour-propre my mentor
tried to awaken in me, by leading me to pride, rendered men even more vile in my
eyes and succeeded only in adding contempt to my hatred for them.
"Without directly combating this pride, the priest prevented it from turning into
hardness of soul; and without taking self-esteem from me, he made it less
disdainful of my neighbor. In always setting aside vain appearance and showing me
the real evils it covers, he taught me to regret the errors of my fellows, to be
touched by their miseries, and to pity them more than to envy them. Moved with
compassion for human weaknesses by the profound sentiment of his own, he saw men
everywhere the victims of their own and others' vices. He saw the poor groaning
under the yoke of the rich and the rich under the yoke of prejudice. 'Believe me,'
he said, 'our illusions, far from hiding our ills from us, increase them by giving
a value to that which has none and by making us sensitive to countless false
privations we would not feel without them. Peace of soul consists in contempt for
everything which can trouble it. The man who sets the greatest store by life is he
who knows least how to enjoy it. And the one who aspires most avidly to happiness
is always most miserable.'
" 'Oh, what sad pictures!' I cried out with bitterness. 'If one must turn away from
everything, what was the use for us of being born? And if
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EMILE
one must despise happiness itself, who knows how to be happy?' 'I do,' answered the
priest one day in a tone which struck me. 'You happy! So little fortunate, so poor,
exiled, persecuted, you are happy! And what have you done to be so?' 'My child,' he
went on, 'I shall be glad to tell you.'
"Thereupon he made me understand that after having received my confessions, he
wanted to make me his. 'I shall unbosom all the sentiments of my heart to you,' he
said, embracing me. 'You shall see me, if not as I am, at least as I see myself.
When you have received my whole profession of faith, when you know well the state
of my heart, you will know why I esteem myself happy and, if you think as I do,
what you have to do to be so. But what I have to avow is not the business of a
moment. Time is required to expound to you all I think about man's fate and the
true value of life. Let us pick a time and a place suitable for devoting ourselves
peacefully to this conversation.'
"I indicated eagerness to hear him. The appointment was put off till no later than
the next morning. It was summer. We got up at daybreak. He took me outside of the
city on a high hill beneath which ran the Po, whose course was seen along the
fertile banks it washes. In the distance the immense chain of the Alps crowned the
landscape. The rays of the rising sun already grazed the plains and, projecting on
the fields long shadows of the trees, the vineyards, and the houses, enriched with
countless irregularities of light the most beautiful scene which can strike the
human eye. One would have said that nature displayed all its magnificence to our
eyes in order 41 to present them with the text for our conversation. It was there
that after having contemplated these objects in silence for some time, the man of
peace spoke to me as follows:
Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar
My child, do not expect either learned speeches or profound reasonings from me. I
am not a great philosopher, and I care little to be one. But I sometimes have good
sense, and I always love the truth. I do not want to argue with you or even attempt
to convince you. It is enough for me to reveal to you what I think in the
simplicity of my heart. Consult yours during my speech. This is all I ask of you.
If I am mistaken, it is in good faith. That is enough for my error not to be
imputed to crime. If you were to be similarly mistaken, there would be little evil
in that. Reason is common to us, and we have the same interest in listening to it.
If I think well, why would you not think as do I?
I was born poor and a peasant, destined by my station to cultivate the earth. But
it was thought to be a finer thing for me to learn to earn my bread in the priest's
trade, and the means were found to permit me to study. Certainly neither my parents
nor I thought very much of seeking what was good, true, and useful, but rather we
thought of what had to be known in order to be ordained. I learned what I was
supposed
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to learn; I said what I was supposed to say. I committed myself as I was supposed
to, and I was made a priest. But it was not long before I sensed that in obliging
myself not to be a man I had promised more than I could keep.
We are told that conscience is the work of prejudices. Nevertheless I know by my
experience that conscience persists in following the order of nature against all
the laws of men. We may very well be forbidden this or that, but remorse always
reproaches us feebly for what well-ordered nature permits us, and all the more so
for what it prescribes to us. Oh, good young man, nature has as yet said nothing to
your senses! May you live a long time in the happy state in which its voice is that
of innocence. Remember that nature is offended even more when one anticipates it
than when one combats it. One must begin by learning how to resist in order to know
when one can give in without its being a crime.
From my youth on I have respected marriage as the first and the holiest institution
of nature. Having taken away my right to submit myself to it, I resolved not to
profane it; for in spite of my classes and studies, I had always led a uniform and
simple life, and I had preserved all the clarity of the original understanding in
my mind. The maxims of the world had not obscured it, and my poverty removed me
from the temptations dictated by the sophisms of vice.
This resolve was precisely what destroyed me. My respect for the bed of others left
my faults exposed. The scandal had to be expiated. Arrested, interdicted, driven
out, I was far more the victim of my scruples than of my incontinence; and I had
occasion to understand, from the reproaches with which my disgrace was accompanied,
that often one need only aggravate the fault to escape the punishment.
A few such experiences lead a reflective mind a long way. Seeing the ideas that I
had of the just, the decent, and all the duties of man overturned by gloomy
observations, I lost each day one of the opinions I had received. Since those
opinions that remained were no longer sufficient to constitute together a self-
sustaining body, I felt the obviousness of the principles gradually becoming dimmer
in my mind. And finally reduced to no longer knowing what to think, I reached the
same point where you are, with the difference that my incredulity, the late fruit
of a riper age, had been more painfully formed and ought to have been more
difficult to destroy.
I was in that frame of mind of uncertainty and doubt that Descartes demands for the
quest for truth. This state is hardly made to last. It is disturbing and painful.
It is only the self-interest of vice or laziness of soul which leaves us in it. My
heart was not sufficiently corrupted to enjoy myself in it, and nothing preserves
the habit of reflection better than being more content with oneself than with one's
fortune.
I meditated therefore on the sad fate of mortals, floating on this sea of human
opinions without rudder or compass and delivered to their stormy passions without
any other guide than an inexperienced pilot who is ignorant of his route and knows
neither where he is coming from nor where he is going. I said to myself, "I love
the truth, I seek it and cannot recognize it. Let it be revealed to me, and I shall
remain
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EMILE
attached to it. Why must it hide itself from the eagerness of a heart made to adore
it?"
Although I have often experienced greater evils, I have never led a life so
constantly disagreeable as during those times of perplexity and anxiety, when I
ceaselessly wandered from doubt to doubt and brought back from my long meditations
only uncertainty, obscurity, and contradictions about the cause of my being and the
principle of my duties.
How can one systematically and in good faith be a skeptic? I cannot understand it.
These skeptic philosophers either do not exist or are the unhappiest of men. Doubt
about the things it is important for us to know is too violent a state for the
human mind, which does not hold out in this state for long. It decides in spite of
itself one way or the other and prefers to be deceived rather than to believe
nothing.
What doubled my confusion was that I was born in a church which decides everything
and permits no doubt; therefore, the rejection of a single point made me reject all
the rest, and the impossibility of accepting so many absurd decisions also detached
me from those which were not absurd. By being told "Believe everything," I was
prevented from believing anything, and I no longer knew where to stop.
I consulted the philosophers. I leafed through their books. I examined their
various opinions. I found them all to be proud, assertive, dogmatic (even in their
pretended skepticism), ignorant of nothing, proving nothing, mocking one another;
and this last point, which was common to all, appeared to me the only one about
which they are all right. Triumphant when they attack, they are without force in
defending themselves. If you ponder their reasoning, they turn out to be good only
at destructive criticism. If you count votes, each is reduced to his own. They
agree only to dispute. Listening to them was not the means of getting out of my
uncertainty.
I comprehended that the insufficiency of the human mind is the first cause of this
prodigious diversity of sentiments and that pride is the second. We do not have the
measurements of this immense machine; we cannot calculate its relations; we know
neither its first laws nor its final cause. We do not know ourselves; we know
neither our nature nor our active principle. We hardly know if man is a simple or a
compound being. Impenetrable mysteries surround us on all sides; they are above the
region accessible to the senses. We believe we possess intelligence for piercing
these mysteries, but all we have is imagination. Through this imaginary world each
blazes a trail he believes to be good. None can know whether his leads to the goal.
Nevertheless we want to penetrate everything, to know everything. The only thing we
do not know is how to be ignorant of what we cannot know. We would rather decide at
random and believe what is not than admit that none of us can see what is. We are a
small part of a great whole whose limits escape us and whose Author delivers us to
our mad disputes; but we are vain enough to want to decide what this whole is in
itself and what we are in relation to it.
If the philosophers were in a position to discover the truth, who among them would
take an interest in it? Each knows well that his
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system is no better founded than the others. But he maintains it because it is his.
There is not a single one of them who, if he came to know the true and the false,
would not prefer the lie he has found to the truth discovered by another. Where is
the philosopher who would not gladly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is
the one who in the secrecy of his heart sets himself any other goal than that of
distinguishing himself? Provided that he raises himself above the vulgar, provided
that he dims the brilliance of his competitors, what more does he ask? The
essential thing is to think differently from others. Among believers he is an
atheist; among atheists he would be a believer.
The first fruit I drew from these reflections was to learn to limit my researches
to what was immediately related to my interest, to leave myself in a profound
ignorance of all the rest, and to worry myself to the point of doubt only about
things it was important for me to know.
I understood further that the philosophers, far from delivering me from my useless
doubts, would only cause those which tormented me to multiply and would resolve
none of them. Therefore, I took another guide, and I said to myself, "Let us
consult the inner light; it will lead me astray less than they lead me astray; or
at least my error will be my own, and I will deprave myself less in following my
own illusions than in yielding to their lies."
Then, going over in my mind the various opinions which had one by one drawn me
along since my birth, I saw that although none of them was evident enough to
produce conviction immediately, they had various degrees of verisimilitude, and
inner assent was given or refused to them in differing measure. On the basis of
this first observation, I compared all these different ideas in the silence of the
prejudices, and I found that the first and most common was also the simplest and
most reasonable, and that the only thing that prevented it from gaining all the
votes was that it had not been proposed last. Imagine all your ancient and modern
philosophers having first exhausted their bizarre systems of forces, chances,
fatality, necessity, atoms, an animate world, living matter, and materialism of
every kind; and after them all the illustrious Clarke 4- enlightening the world,
proclaiming at last the Being of beings and the Dispenser of things. With what
universal admiration, with what unanimous applause would this new system have been
received—this new system so great, so consoling, so sublime, so fit to lift up the
soul and to give a foundation to virtue, and at the same time so striking, so
luminous, so simple, and, it seems to me, presenting fewer incomprehensible things
to the human mind than the absurdities it finds in any other system! I said to
myself, "Insoluble objections are common to all systems because man's mind is too
limited to resolve them. They do not therefore constitute a proof against any one
in particular. But what a difference in direct proofs! Must not the only one which
explains everything be preferred, if it contains no more difficulties than the
others?"
Therefore, taking the love of the truth as my whole philosophy, and as my whole
method an easy and simple rule that exempts me from the vain subtlety of arguments,
I pick up again on the basis of this rule the examination of the knowledge that
interests me. I am resolved
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to accept as evident all knowledge to which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot
refuse my consent; to accept as true all that which appears to me to have a
necessary connection with this first knowledge; and to leave all the rest in
uncertainty without rejecting it or accepting it and without tormenting myself to
clarify it if it leads to nothing useful for practice.
But who am I? What right have I to judge things, and what determines my judgments?
If they are swept along, forced by the impressions I receive, I tire myself out in
vain with these researches; they will or will not be made on their own without my
mixing in to direct them. Thus my glance must first be turned toward myself in
order to know the instrument I wish to use and how far I can trust its use.
I exist, and I have senses by which I am affected. This is the first truth that
strikes me and to which I am forced to acquiesce. Do I have a particular sentiment
of my existence, or do I sense it only through my sensations? This is my first
doubt, which it is for the present impossible for me to resolve; for as I am
continually affected by sensations, whether immediately or by memory, how can I
know whether the sentiment of the I is something outside these same sensations and
whether it can be independent of them?
My sensations take place in me, since they make me sense my existence; but their
cause is external to me, since they affect me without my having anything to do with
it, and I have nothing to do with producing or annihilating them. Therefore, I
clearly conceive that my sensation, which is in me, and its cause or its object,
which is outside of me, are not the same thing.
Thus, not only do I exist, but there exist other beings—the objects of my
sensations; and even if these objects were only ideas, it is still true that these
ideas are not me.
Now, all that I sense outside of me and which acts on my senses, I call matter; and
all the portions of matter which I conceive to be joined together in individual
beings, I call bodies. Thus all the disputes of idealists and materialists signify
nothing to me. Their distinctions concerning the appearance and reality of bodies
are chimeras.
Already I am as sure of the universe's existence as of my own. Next, I reflect on
the objects of my sensations; and, finding in myself the faculty of comparing them,
I sense myself endowed with an active force which I did not before know I had.
To perceive is to sense; to compare is to judge. Judging and sensing are not the
same thing. By sensation, objects are presented to me separated, isolated, such as
they are in nature. By comparison I move them, I transport them, and, so to speak,
I superimpose them on one another in order to pronounce on their difference or
their likeness and generally on all their relations. According to me, the
distinctive faculty of the active or intelligent being is to be able to give a
sense to the word is. I seek in vain in the purely sensitive being for this
intelligent force which superimposes and which then pronounces; I am not able to
see it in its nature. This passive being will sense each object separately, or it
will even sense the total object formed by the two; but,
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having no force to bend them back on one another, it will never compare them, it
will not judge them.
To see two objects at once is not to see their relations or to judge their
differences. To perceive several objects as separate from one another is not to
number them. I can at the same instant have the idea of a large stick and of a
small stick without comparing them and without judging that one is smaller than the
other, just as I can see my entire hand at once without making the count of my
fingers.* These comparative ideas, larger and smaller, just like the numerical
ideas of one, two, etc., certainly do not belong to the sensations, although my
mind produces them only on the occasion of my sensations.
We are told that the sensitive being distinguishes the sensations from one another
by the differences among these very sensations. This requires explication. When the
sensations are different, the sensitive being distinguishes them by their
differences. When they are similar, it distinguishes them because it senses them as
separate from one another. Otherwise, how in a simultaneous sensation would the
sensitive being distinguish two equal objects? It would necessarily have to
confound these two objects and take them to be the same, especially in a system in
which it is claimed that the sensations representing extension are not extended.
When the two sensations to be compared are perceived, their impression is made,
each object is sensed, the two are sensed; but, for all that, their relation is not
yet sensed. If the judgment of this relation were only a sensation and came to me
solely from the object, my judgments would never deceive me, since it is never
false that I sense what I sense.
Why is it, then, that I am deceived about the relation of these two sticks,
especially if they are not parallel? Why do I say, for example, that the small
stick is a third of the large one, whereas it is only a quarter? Why is the image,
which is the sensation, not conformable to its model, which is the object? It is
because I am active when I judge, because the operation which compares is faulty,
and because my understanding, which judges the relations, mixes its errors in with
the truth of the sensations, which reveal only the objects.
Add to that a reflection I am sure will strike you when you have thought about it.
It is that if we were purely passive in the use of our senses, there would be no
communication among them. It would be impossible for us to know that the body we
touch and the object we see are the same. Either we would never sense anything
outside of us, or there would be five sensible substances for us whose identity we
would have no means of perceiving.
Let this or that name be given to this force of my mind which brings together and
compares my sensations; let it be called attention, meditation, reflection, or
whatever one wishes. It is still true that it is in me and not in things, that it
is I alone who produce it, although I produce it only on the occasion of the
impression made on me by objects.
* The reports of M. de la Condamine tell us of a people who only know how to count
to three. Nevertheless the men who composed this people had hands, and thus had
often perceived their fingers without knowing how to count to five.43
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Without being master of sensing or not sensing, I am the master of giving more or
less examination to what I sense.
Therefore, I am not simply a sensitive and passive being but an active and
intelligent being; and whatever philosophy may say about it, I shall dare to
pretend to the honor of thinking. I know only that truth is in things and not in
the mind which judges them, and that the less of myself I put in the judgments I
make, the more sure I am of approaching the truth. Thus my rule of yielding to
sentiment more than to reason is confirmed by reason itself.
Having, so to speak, made certain of myself, I begin to look outside of myself, and
I consider myself with a sort of shudder, cast out and lost in this vast universe,
as if drowned in the immensity of beings, without knowing anything about what they
are either in themselves or in relation to me. I study them, I observe them, and
the first object which presents itself to me for comparison with them is myself.
Everything I perceive with the senses is matter; and I deduce all the essential
properties of matter from the sensible qualities that make me perceive it and are
inseparable from it. I see it now in motion and now at rest,* from which I infer
that neither rest nor motion is essential to it. But motion, since it is an action,
is the effect of a cause of which rest is only the absence. Therefore, when nothing
acts on matter, it does not move; and by the very fact that it is neutral to rest
and to motion, its natural state is to be at rest.
I perceive in bodies two sorts of motion—communicated motion and spontaneous or
voluntary motion. In the first the cause of motion is external to the body moved;
and in the second it is within it. I do not conclude from this that the movement of
a watch, for example, is spontaneous; for if nothing external to the spring acted
on it, it would not strain to straighten itself out and would not pull the chain.
For the same reason neither would I grant spontaneity to fluids or to fire itself,
which causes their fluidity.!
You will ask me if the motions of animals are spontaneous. I shall tell you that I
know nothing about it, but analogy supports the affirmative. You will ask me again
how I know that there are spontaneous motions. I shall tell you that I know it
because I sense it. I want to move my arm, and I move it without this movement's
having another immediate cause than my will. It would be vain to try to use reason
to destroy this sentiment in me. It is stronger than any evidence. One might just
as well try to prove to me that I do not exist.
If there were no spontaneity in the actions of men or in anything which takes place
on earth, one would only be more at a loss to imagine the first cause of all
motion. As for me, I sense myself to be so persuaded that the natural state of
matter is to be at rest and that by
* This rest is, if you wish, only relative. But since we observe degrees of more
and less in motion, we have a very clear conception of one of the two extreme
terms, which is rest; and we have such a good conception of it that we are even
inclined to take as absolute rest, rest that is only relative. Now, it is not true
that motion is of the essence of matter if it can be conceived at rest.
t Chemists regard phlogiston, or the element of fire, as scattered, immobile, and
stagnant in the mixtures of which it is part until external causes disengage it,
gather it together, set it in motion, and change it into fire.
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itself it has no force for acting, that when I see a body in motion, I judge
immediately either that it is an animate body or that this motion has been
communicated to it. My mind rejects all acquiescence to the idea of unorganized
matter moving itself or producing some action.
Meanwhile, this visible universe is matter, scattered and dead matter * which as a
whole has nothing in it of the union, the organization, or the sentiment common to
the parts of an animate body, since it is certain that we do not sense ourselves as
parts of a sentient whole. This same universe is in motion; and in its motion,
which is regular, uniform, and subjected to constant laws, it contains nothing of
that liberty appearing in the spontaneous motions of man and the animals. The world
therefore is not a large animal that moves itself. Therefore there is some cause of
its motions external to it, one which I do not perceive. But inner persuasion makes
this cause so evident to my senses that I cannot see the sun rotate without
imagining a force that pushes it; or if the earth turns, I believe I sense a hand
that makes it turn.
If I have to accept general laws whose essential relations with matter I do not
perceive, how does that help me? These laws, not being real beings or substances,
must have some other foundation which is unknown to me. Experience and observation
have enabled us to know the laws of motion; these laws determine the effects
without showing the causes. They do not suffice to explain the system of the world
and the movement of the universe. Descartes formed heaven and earth with dice, but
he was not able to give the first push to these dice or to put his centrifugal
force in action without the aid of a rotary motion.44 Newton discovered the law of
attraction, but attraction alone would soon reduce the universe to an immobile
mass. To this law he had to add a projectile 45 force in order to make the
celestial bodies describe curves. Let Descartes tell us what physical law made his
vortices turn. Let Newton show us the hand which launched the planets on the
tangent of their orbits.
The first causes of motion are not in matter. It receives motion and communicates
it, but it does not produce it. The more I observe the action and the reaction of
the forces of nature acting on one another, the more I find that one must always go
back from effects to effects to some will as first cause; for to suppose an
infinite regress of causes is to suppose no cause at all. In a word, every motion
not produced by another can come only from a spontaneous, voluntary action.
Inanimate bodies act only by motion, and there is no true action without will. This
is my first principle. I believe therefore that a will moves the universe and
animates nature. This is my first dogma, or my first article of faith.
How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I do not know, but I
experience within myself that it does so. I want to act, and I act. I want to move
my body, and my body moves. But that an inanimate body at rest should succeed in
moving itself or in producing
* I have made every effort to conceive of a living molecule without succeeding. The
idea of matter sensing without having senses appears unintelligible and
contradictory to me. To accept or to reject this idea one would have to begin by
understanding it, and I admit that I have not been so fortunate.
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motion—that is incomprehensible and without example. The will is known to me by its
acts, not by its nature. I know this will as a cause of motion; but to conceive of
matter as productive of motion is clearly to conceive of an effect without a cause;
it is to conceive of absolutely nothing.
It is no more possible for me to conceive of how my will moves my body than it is
to conceive of how my sensations affect my soul. I do not even know why one of
these mysteries has appeared more explicable than the other. As for me, whether it
is when I am passive or when I am active, the means of uniting the two substances
appears absolutely incomprehensible. It is quite strange to begin from this very
incomprehensibility in order to confound the two substances, as if operations of
such different natures were better explained in a single subject than in two.
It is true that the dogma I have just established is obscure, but still it makes
sense and contains nothing repugnant to reason or to observation. Can one say as
much of materialism? Is it not clear that if motion were essential to matter, it
would be inseparable from it and would always be in it in the same degree? Always
the same in each portion of matter, it would be incommunicable, it could not
increase or decrease, and one could not even conceive of matter at rest. When
someone tells me that motion is not essential but necessary to matter, he is trying
to lead me astray with words which would be easier to refute if they contained a
bit more sense; for either the motion of matter comes to it from itself and is then
essential to it, or if it comes to it from an external cause, it is necessary to
matter only insofar as the cause of motion acts on it. We are back with the first
difficulty.
General and abstract ideas are the source of men's greatest errors. The jargon of
metaphysics has never led us to discover a single truth, and it has filled
philosophy with absurdities of which one is ashamed as soon as one has stripped
them of their big words. Tell me, my friend, whether someone who talks to you about
a blind force spread throughout the whole of nature brings any veritable idea to
your mind? People believe that they say something with those vague words universal
force and necessary motion, and they say nothing at all. The idea of motion is
nothing other than the idea of transport from one place to another. There is no
motion without some direction, for an individual being could not move in all
directions at once. In what direction, then, does matter necessarily move? Does all
the matter in a body have a uniform motion, or does each atom have its own
movement? According to the former idea, the whole universe ought to form a solid
and indivisible mass. According to the latter, it ought to form only a scattered
and incoherent fluid without it ever being possible for two atoms to join. What
direction will this common movement of all matter take? Will it be in a straight
line, up, down, right, or left? If each molecule of matter has its particular
direction, what will be the causes of all these directions and all these
differences? If each atom or molecule of matter only turns around its own center,
nothing would ever leave its place, and there would not be any communicated motion.
Moreover, this circular motion would have to be determined in some direction. To
give matter
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abstract motion is to speak words signifying nothing; and to give it a determinate
motion is to suppose a cause determining it. The more I multiply particular forces,
the more I have new causes to explain without ever finding any common agent
directing them. Far from being able to imagine any order in the fortuitous
concurrence of elements, I am not even able to imagine their conflict, and the
chaos of the universe is more inconceivable to me than is its harmony. I comprehend
that the mechanism of the world may not be intelligible to the human mind, but as
soon as a man meddles with explaining it, he ought to say things men understand.
If moved matter shows me a will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me an
intelligence. This is my second article of faith. To act, to compare, and to choose
are operations of an active and thinking being. Therefore this being exists. "Where
do you see him existing?" you are going to say to me. Not only in the heavens which
turn, not only in the star which gives us light, not only in myself, but in the ewe
which grazes, in the bird which flies, in the stone which falls, in the leaf
carried by the wind.
I judge that there is an order in the world although I do not know its end; to
judge that there is this order it suffices for me to compare the parts in
themselves, to study their concurrences and their relations, to note their harmony.
I do not know why the universe exists, but that does not prevent me from seeing how
it is modified, or from perceiving the intimate correspondence by which the beings
that compose it lend each other mutual assistance. I am like a man who saw a watch
opened for the first time and, although he did not know the machine's use and had
not seen the dial, was not prevented from admiring the work. "I do not know," he
would say, "what the whole is good for, but I do see tht each piece is made for the
others; I admire the workman in the details of his work; and I am quite sure that
all these wheels are moving in harmony only for a common end which it is impossible
for me to perceive."
Let us compare the particular ends, the means, the ordered relations of every kind.
Then let us listen to our inner sentiment. What healthy mind can turn aside its
testimony; to which unprejudiced eyes does the sensible order not proclaim a
supreme intelligence; and how many sophisms must be piled up before it is
impossible to recognize the harmony of the beings and the admirable concurrences of
each piece in the preservation of the others? They can talk to me all they want
about combination and chance. Of what use is it to you to reduce me to silence if
you cannot lead me to persuasion, and how will you take away from me the
involuntary sentiment that always gives you the lie in spite of myself? If
organized bodies were combined fortuitously in countless ways before taking on
constant forms, if at the outset there were formed stomachs without mouths, feet
without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of every kind which have
perished for want of being able to preserve themselves, why do none of these
unformed attempts strike our glance any longer, why did nature finally prescribe
laws to itself to which it was not subjected at the outset? I should not, I agree,
be surprised that a thing happens, if it is possible
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and the difficulty of its occurrence is compensated for by the number of throws of
the dice. Nevertheless, if someone were to come to me and say that print thrown
around at random had produced the Aeneid all in order, I would not deign to take a
step to verify the lie. "You forget," I shall be told, "the number of throws." But
how many of those throws must I assume in order to make the combination credible?
As for me, seeing only a single throw, I can give odds of infinity to one that what
it produced is not the result of chance. Consider also that combination and chance
will never result in anything but products of the same nature as the elements that
are combined; that organization and life will not result from a throw of atoms; and
that a chemist combining mixtures will not make them feel and think in his
crucible. *
I was surprised, and almost scandalized, at reading Nieuventit.47 How could that
man have wanted to compose a book detailing the wonders of nature that show the
wisdom of its Author? His book could be as big as the world without his having
exhausted his subject; and as soon as one wishes to enter into the details, the
greatest wonder—the harmony and accord of the whole—is overlooked. The generation
of living and organized bodies is by itself an abyss for the human mind. The
insurmountable barrier that nature set between the various species, so that they
would not be confounded, shows its intentions with the utmost clarity. It was not
satisfied with establishing order. It took certain measures so that nothing could
disturb that order.
There is not a being in the universe that cannot in some respect be regarded as the
common center around which all the others are ordered, in such a way that they are
all reciprocally ends and means relative to one another. The mind is confused and
gets lost in this infinity of relations, not a single one of which is either
confused or lost in the crowd. How many absurd suppositions are needed to deduce
all this harmony from the blind mechanism of matter moved fortuitously! Those who
deny the unity of intention manifested in the relations of all the parts of this
great whole can try to cover their nonsense with abstractions, coordinations,
general principles, and symbolic terms. Whatever they do, it is impossible for me
to conceive of a system of beings so constantly ordered without conceiving of an
intelligence which orders it. I do not have it within me to believe that passive
and dead matter could have produced living and sensing beings, that a blind
fatality could have produced intelligent beings, that what does not think could
have produced thinking beings.
I believe therefore that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will. I see
it or, rather, I sense it; and that is something important for me to know. But is
this same world eternal or created? Is there a single principle of things? Or, are
there two or many of them, and what is
* Would anyone believe, if he did not have the proof, that human foolishness could
have been brought to this point? Amatus Lusitanus affirmed that he had seen a
little man an inch long, closed up in a bottle, whom Julius Camillus, like another
Prometheus, had made by the science of alchemy. Paracelsus, De natura rerum,K
teaches the way to produce these little men and maintains that the pygmies, the
fauns, the satyrs, and the nymphs were engendered by chemistry. Indeed, I do not
see that anything further remains to be done to establish the possibility of these
facts, other than to advance that organic matter resists the heat of fire and that
its molecules can be preserved alive in a reverberatory furnace.
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their nature? I know nothing about all this, and what does it matter to me? As soon
as this knowledge has something to do with my interests, I shall make an effort to
acquire it. Until then I renounce idle questions which may agitate my amour-propre
but are useless for my conduct and are beyond my reason.
Always remember that I am not teaching my sentiment; I am revealing it. Whether
matter is eternal or created, whether there is or is not a passive principle, it is
in any event certain that the whole is one and proclaims a single intelligence; for
I see nothing which is not ordered according to the same system and does not
contribute to the same end —namely, the preservation of the whole in its
established order. This Being which wills and is powerful, this Being active in
itself, this Being, whatever it may be, which moves the universe and orders all
things, I call God. I join to this name the ideas of intelligence, power, and will
which I have brought together, and that of goodness which is their necessary
consequence. But I do not as a result know better the Being to which I have given
them; it is hidden equally from my senses and from my understanding. The more I
think about it, the more I am confused. I know very certainly that it exists, and
that it exists by itself. I know that my existence is subordinated to its
existence, and that all things known to me are in absolutely the same situation. I
perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.
But as soon as I want to contemplate Him in Himself, as soon as I want to find out
where He is, what He is, what His substance is, He escapes me, and my clouded mind
no longer perceives anything.
Suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of
God without being forced to by the sentiment of His relations with me. These
reasonings are always rash; a wise man ought to yield to them only with trembling
and with certainty that he is not made to plumb their depths; for what is most
insulting to the divinity is not thinking not at all about it but thinking badly
about it.
After having discovered those attributes of the divinity by which I know its
existence, I return to myself and I try to learn what rank I occupy in the order of
things that the divinity governs and I can examine. I find myself by my species
incontestably in the first rank; for by my will and by the instruments in my power
for executing it, I have more force for acting on all the bodies surrounding me,
for yielding to or eluding their actions as I please, than any of them has for
acting on me against my will by physical impulsion alone; and by my intelligence I
am the only one that has a view of the whole. What being here on earth besides man
is able to observe all the others, to measure, calculate, and foresee their
movements and their effects, and to join, so to speak, the sentiment of common
existence to that of its individual existence? What is there so ridiculous about
thinking that everything is made for me, if I am the only one who is able to relate
everything to himself?
It is true, then, that man is the king of the earth he inhabits; for not only does
he tame all the animals, not only does his industry put the elements at his
disposition, but he alone on earth knows how to do so,
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and he also appropriates to himself, by means of contemplation, the very stars he
cannot approach. Show me another animal on earth who knows how to make use of fire
and who knows how to wonder at the sun. What! I can observe and know the beings and
their relations, I can sense what order, beauty, and virtue are, I can contemplate
the universe and raise myself up to the hand which governs it, I can love the good
and do it, and I would compare myself to the brutes? Abject soul, it is your gloomy
philosophy which makes you similar to them. Or, rather, you want in vain to debase
yourself. Your genius bears witness against your principles, your beneficent heart
gives the lie to your doctrine, and the very abuse of your faculties proves their
excellence in spite of you.
As for me—1 who have no system to maintain, I, a simple and true man who is carried
away by the fury of no party and does not aspire to the honor of being chief of a
sect, I who am content with the place in which God has put me, I see nothing,
except for Him, that is better than my species. And if I had to choose my place in
the order of beings, what more could I choose than to be a man?
The effect of this reflection is less to make me proud than to touch me; for this
state is not of my choice, and it was not due to the merit of a being who did not
yet exist. Can I see myself thus distinguished without congratulating myself on
filling this honorable post and without blessing the hand which placed me in it?
From my first return to myself there is born in my heart a sentiment of gratitude
and benediction for the Author of my species; and from this sentiment my first
homage to the beneficent divinity. I adore the supreme power, and I am moved by its
benefactions. I do not need to be taught this worship; it is dictated to me by
nature itself. Is it not a natural consequence of self-love to honor what protects
us and to love what wishes us well?
But when next I seek to know my individual place in my species, and I consider its
various ranks and the men who fill them, what happens to me? What a spectacle!
Where is the order I had observed? The picture of nature had presented me with only
harmony and proportion; that of mankind presents me with only confusion and
disorder! Concert reigns among the elements, and men are in chaos! The animals are
happy; their king alone is miserable! O wisdom, where are your laws? O providence,
is it thus that you rule the world? Beneficent Being, what has become of your
power? I see evil on earth.
Would you believe, my good friend, that from these gloomy reflections and these
apparent contradictions there were formed in my mind the sublime ideas of the soul
which had not until then resulted from my researches? In meditating on the nature
of man, I believed I discovered in it two distinct principles; one of which raised
him to the study of eternal truths, to the love of justice and moral beauty, and to
the regions of the intellectual world whose contemplation is the wise man's
delight; while the other took him basely into himself, subjected him to the empire
of the senses and to the passions which are their ministers, and by means of these
hindered all that the sentiment of the former inspired in him. In sensing myself
carried away and caught up in the combat of these two contrary motions, I said to
myself, "No,
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man is not one. I want and I do not want; I sense myself enslaved and free at the
same time. I see the good, I love it, and I do the bad. I am active when I listen
to reason, passive when my passions carry me away; and my worst torment, when I
succumb, is to sense that I could have resisted."
Young man, listen with confidence; I shall always be of good faith. If conscience
is the work of the prejudices, I am doubtless wrong, and there is no demonstrable
morality. But if to prefer oneself to everything is an inclination natural to man,
and if nevertheless the first sentiment of justice is innate in the human heart,
let him who regards man as a simple being overcome these contradictions, and I
shall no longer acknowledge more than one substance.
You will note that by this word substance I understand in general being that is
endowed with some primary quality, abstracting from all particular or secondary
modifications. Therefore, if all the primary qualities known to us can be joined in
the same being, one ought to admit only one substance; but if some are mutually
exclusive, there are as many diverse substances as there are such possible
exclusions. You will reflect on that; as for me, whatever Locke says about it,48 I
need only know that matter is extended and divisible in order to be sure that it
cannot think. And for all that any philosopher who comes to tell me that trees
sense and rocks think * may entangle me in his subtle arguments, I can see in him
only a sophist speaking in bad faith who prefers to attribute sentiment to rocks
than to grant a soul to man.
Let us suppose a deaf man who denies the existence of sounds because they have
never struck his ear. By means of a hidden stringed instrument, I make another
stringed instrument that I have placed before his eyes sound in unison with it. The
deaf man sees the string vibrate. I say to him, "It is sound which causes that."
"Not at all," he answers. "The cause of the string's vibration is in it. It is a
quality common to all bodies to vibrate thus." "Then show me," I respond, "this
vibration in other bodies or, at least, its cause in this string." "I cannot,"
* It seems to me that far from saying that rocks think, modern philosophy has
discovered, on the contrary, that men do not think. It no longer recognizes
anything but sensitive beings in nature, and the whole difference it finds between
a man and a stone is that man is a sensitive being with sensations while a stone is
a sensitive being without them. But if it is true that all matter senses, where
shall I conceive the sensitive unity or the individual I to be? Will it be in each
molecule of matter or in the aggregate bodies? Shall I put this unity equally in
fluids and solids, in compounds and elements? There are, it is said, only
individuals in nature. But what are these individuals? Is this stone an individual
or an aggregate of individuals? Is it a single sensitive being, or does it contain
in it as many sensitive beings as it does grains of sand? If each elementary atom
is a sensitive being, how shall I conceive that intimate communication by means of
which one senses itself in another so that their two I's merge into one? Attraction
may be a law of nature whose mystery is unknown to us; but we can at least conceive
that attraction, acting according to mass, contains nothing incompatible with
extension and divisibility. Can you conceive the same thing of sentiment? The
sensible parts are extended, but the sensitive being is indivisible and one. It
cannot be divided; it is whole, or it is nothing. The sensitive being is therefore
not a body. I do not know how our materalists understand it; but it seems to me
that the same difficulties that make them reject thought also ought to make them
reject sentiment, and I do not see why, having made the first step, they would not
also make the other. What more would it cost them; and since they are sure that
they do not think, how do they dare to affirm that they sense?
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replies the deaf man, "but because I cannot conceive how this string vibrates, why
must I go and explain that by your sounds, of which I do not have the slightest
idea? That is to explain an obscure fact by a cause still more obscure. Either make
your sounds accessible to my senses, or I say that they do not exist."
The more I reflect on thought and on the nature of the human mind, the more I find
that the reasoning of materialists resembles that of this deaf man. They are indeed
deaf to the inner voice crying out to them in a tone difficult not to recognize. A
machine does not think; there is neither motion nor figure which produces
reflection. Something in you seeks to break the bonds constraining it. Space is not
your measure; the whole universe is not big enough for you. Your sentiments, your
desires, your uneasiness, even your pride have another principle than this narrow
body in which you sense yourself enchained.
No material being is active by itself, and I am. One may very well argue with me
about this; but I sense it, and this sentiment that speaks to me is stronger than
the reason combating it. I have a body on which other bodies act and which acts on
them. This reciprocal action is not doubtful. But my will is independent of my
senses; I consent or I resist; I succumb or I conquer; and I sense perfectly within
myself when I do what I wanted to do or when all I am doing is giving way to my
passions. I always have the power to will, I do not always have the force to
execute. When I abandon myself to temptations, I act according to the impulsion of
external objects. When I reproach myself for this weakness, I listen only to my
will. I am enslaved because of my vices and free because of my remorse. The
sentiment of my freedom is effaced in me only when I become depraved and finally
prevent the voice of the soul from being raised against the law of the body.
I know will only by the sentiment of my own will, and understanding is no better
known to me. When I am asked what the cause is which determines my will, I ask in
turn what the cause is which determines my judgment; for it is clear that these two
causes are only one; and if one clearly understands that man is active in his
judgments, and that his understanding is only the power of comparing and judging,
one will see that his freedom is only a similar power or one derived from the
former. One chooses the good as he has judged the true; if he judges wrong, he
chooses badly. What, then, is the cause which determines his will? It is his
judgment. And what is the cause which determines his judgment? It is his
intelligent faculty, it is his power of judging: the determining cause is in
himself. Beyond this I understand nothing more.
Doubtless, I am not free not to want my own good; I am not free to want what is bad
for me. But it is in this precisely that my freedom consists—my being able to will
only what is suitable to me, or what I deem to be such, without anything external
to me determining me. Does it follow that I am not my own master, because I am not
the master of being somebody else than me?
The principle of every action is in the will of a free being. One cannot go back
beyond that. It is not the word freedom which means nothing; it is the word
necessity. To suppose some act, some effect, which does not derive from an active
principle is truly to suppose effects
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without cause; it is to fall into a vicious circle. Either there is no first
impulse, or every first impulse has no prior cause; and there is no true will
without freedom. Man is therefore free in his actions and as such is animated by an
immaterial substance. This is my third article of faith. From these three you will
easily deduce all the others without my continuing to count them out.
If man is active and free, he acts on his own. All that he does freely does not
enter into the ordered system of providence and cannot be imputed to it. Providence
does not will the evil a man does in abusing the freedom it gives him; but it does
not prevent him from doing it, whether because this evil, coming from a being so
weak, is nothing in its eyes, or because it could not prevent it without hindering
his freedom and doing a greater evil by degrading his nature. It has made him free
in order that by choice he do not evil but good. It has put him in a position to
make this choice by using well the faculties with which it has endowed him. But it
has limited his strength to such an extent that the abuse of the freedom it
reserves for him cannot disturb the general order. The evil that man does falls
back on him without changing anything in the system of the world, without
preventing the human species from preserving itself in spite of itself. To complain
about God's not preventing man from doing evil is to complain about His having
given him an excellent nature, about His having put in man's actions the morality
which ennobles them, about His having given him the right to virtue. The supreme
enjoyment is in satisfaction with oneself; it is in order to deserve this
satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom, that we are
tempted by the passions and restrained by conscience. What more could divine power
itself do for us? Could it make our nature contradictory and give the reward for
having done well to him who did not have the power to do evil? What! To prevent man
from being wicked, was it necessary to limit him to instinct and make him a beast?
No, God of my soul, I shall never reproach You for having made him in Your image,
so that I can be free, good, and happy like You!
It is the abuse of our faculties which makes us unhappy and wicked. Our sorrows,
our cares, and our sufferings come to us from ourselves. Moral evil is
incontestably our own work, and physical evil would be nothing without our vices,
which have made us sense it. Is it not for preserving ourselves that nature makes
us sense our needs? Is not the pain of the body a sign that the machine is out of
order and a warning to look after it? Death ... Do not the wicked poison their
lives and ours? Who would want to live always? Death is the remedy for the evils
you do to yourselves; nature did not want you to suffer forever. How few ills there
are to which the man living in primitive simplicity is subject! He lives almost
without diseases as well as passions and neither foresees nor senses death. When he
senses it, his miseries make it desirable to him; from then on it is no longer an
evil for him. If we were satisfied to be what we are, we would not have to lament
our fate. But to seek an imaginary well-being, we give ourselves countless real
ills. Whoever does not know how to endure a bit of suffering ought to expect to
suffer much. When someone has ruined his constitution by a
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disorderly life, he wants to restore it with remedies. To the evil he senses, he
adds the evil he fears. Foresight of death makes it horrible and accelerates it.
The more he wants to flee it, the more he senses it, and he dies of terror
throughout his whole life, while blaming nature for evils which he has made for
himself by offending it.
Man, seek the author of evil no longer. It is yourself. No evil exists other than
that which you do or suffer, and both come to you from yourself. General evil can
exist only in disorder, and I see in the system of the world an unfailing order.
Particular evil exists only in the sentiment of the suffering being, and man did
not receive this sentiment from nature: he gave it to himself. Pain has little hold
over someone who, having reflected little, possesses neither memory nor foresight.
Take away our fatal progress, take away our errors and our vices, take away the
work of man, and everything is good.
Where everything is good, nothing is unjust. Justice is inseparable from goodness.
Now, goodness is the necessary effect of a power without limit and of the self-love
essential to every being aware of itself. The existence of Him who is omnipotent
is, so to speak, coextensive with the existence of the beings. To produce and to
preserve are the perpetual acts of power. He does not act on what is not. God is
not the God of the dead. He could not be destructive and wicked without hurting
Himself. He who can do everything can want only what is good.* Therefore, the
supremely good Being, because He is supremely powerful, ought also to be supremely
just. Otherwise He would contradict Himself; for the love of order which produces
order is called goodness; and the love of order which preserves order is called
justice.
God, it is said, owes His creatures nothing. I believe He owes them all He promises
them in giving them being. Now, to give them the idea of a good and to make them
feel the need of it is to promise it to them. The more I return within myself, and
the more I consult myself, the more I see these words written in my soul: Be just
and you will be happy. That simply is not so, however, considering the present
state of things: the wicked man prospers, and the just man remains oppressed. Also,
see what indignation is kindled in us when this expectation is frustrated!
Conscience is aroused and complains about its Author. It cries out to Him in
moaning, "Thou hast deceived me!"
"I have deceived you, rash man! And who told you so? Is your soul annihilated? Have
you ceased to exist? O Brutus! O my son! Do not soil your noble life by ending it.
Do not leave your hope and your glory with your body on the field of Philippi. Why
do you say, 'Virtue is nothing,' when you are going to enjoy the reward for yours?
You are going to die, you think. No, you are going to live, and it is then that I
shall keep all the promises I have made you."
From the complaints of impatient mortals, one would say that God owes them the
recompense before they have deserved it, and that He is obliged to pay their virtue
in advance. O, let us be good in the first place, and then we shall be happy. Let
us not demand the prize before the
* When the ancients called the supreme God Optimus Maximus, they spoke very truly.
But in saying Maximus Optimus, they would have spoken more exactly, since His
goodness comes from His power. He is good because He is great.
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victory nor the wage before the work. It is not at the starting block, said
Plutarch, that the victors in our sacred games are crowned; it is after they have
gone around the track.49
If the soul is immaterial, it can survive the body; and if it survives the body,
providence is justified. If I had no proof of the immateriality of the soul other
than the triumph of the wicked and the oppression of the just in this world, that
alone would prevent me from doubting it. So shocking a dissonance in the universal
harmony would make me seek to resolve it. I would say to myself, "Everything does
not end with life for us; everything returns to order at death." There would in
truth be the quandary of wondering where man is when everything which can be sensed
about him is destroyed. But this question is no longer a difficulty for me as soon
as I have acknowledged two substances. It is very simple to see that, since during
my corporeal life I perceive nothing except by my senses, what is not subject to
them escapes me. When the union of body and soul is broken, I conceive that the
former can be dissolved while the latter can be preserved. Why would the
destruction of the one entail the destruction of the other? On the contrary, since
they are of such different natures, they were in a violent condition during their
union; and when this union ceases, they both return to their natural condition. The
active and living substance regains all the strength that it used in moving the
passive and dead substance. Alas! I sense it only too much by my vices: man lives
only halfway during his life, and the life of the soul begins only with the death
of the body.
But what is this life, and is the soul immortal by its nature? My limited
understanding conceives nothing without limits. All that is called infinite escapes
me. What can I deny and affirm, what argument can I make about that which I cannot
conceive? I believe that the soul survives the body long enough for the maintenance
of order. Who knows whether that is long enough for it to last forever? However,
whereas I can conceive how the body wears out and is destroyed by the division of
its parts, I cannot conceive of a similar destruction of the thinking being; and,
not imagining how it can die, I presume that it does not die. Since this
presumption consoles me and contains nothing unreasonable, why would I be afraid of
yielding to it?
I sense my soul. I know it by sentiment and by thought. Without knowing what its
essence is, I know that it exists. I cannot reason about ideas I do not have. What
I know surely is that the identity of the I is prolonged only by memory, and that
in order to be actually the same I must remember having been. Now, after my death I
could not recall what I was during my life unless I also recalled what I felt, and
consequently what I did; and I do not doubt that this memory will one day cause the
felicity of the good and the torment of the wicked. Here on earth countless ardent
passions absorb the inner sentiment and lead remorse astray. The humiliation and
the disgrace attracted by the practice of the virtues prevent all their charms from
being felt. But when, after being delivered from the illusions given us by the body
and the senses, we will enjoy the contemplation of the Supreme Being and the
eternal truths of which He is the source; when the beauty of the order will strike
all the powers of our soul; when we are solely occupied with
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comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done—then the voice of
conscience will regain its strength and its empire. It is then that the pure
delight born of satisfaction with oneself and the bitter regret at having debased
oneself will distinguish by inexhaustible sentiments the fate that each has
prepared for himself. Do not ask me, my good friend, whether there will be other
sources of happiness and suffering. I do not know; and those I imagine are enough
to console me for this life and to make me hope for another. I do not say that the
good will be recompensed, for what good can an excellent being attain other than to
exist according to its nature? But I do say that they will be happy, because their
Author, the Author of all justice, having created them as sensitive beings did not
create them to suffer; and since they did not abuse their freedom on earth, they
did not fail to attain their destiny due to their own fault. Nevertheless they
suffered in this life; therefore they will be compensated in another. This
sentiment is founded less on the merit of man than on the notion of goodness which
seems to me inseparable from the divine essence. I am only supposing that the laws
of order are observed and that God is constant to Himself. *
Do not ask me whether the torments of the wicked will be eternal. I do not know
that either and do not have the vain curiosity to clarify useless questions. What
difference does it make to me what will become of the wicked? I take little
interest in their fate. However, I have difficulty in believing that they are
condemned to endless torments. If supreme justice does take vengeance, it does so
beginning in this life. O nations, you and your errors are its ministers. Supreme
justice employs the evils that you do to yourselves to punish the crimes which
brought on those evils. It is in your insatiable hearts, eaten away by envy,
avarice, and ambition, that the avenging passions punish your heinous crimes in the
bosom of your false prosperity. What need is there to look for hell in the other
life? It begins in this one in the hearts of the wicked.
Where our perishable needs end, where our senseless desires cease, our passions and
our crimes ought also to cease. To what perversity would pure spirits be
susceptible? Needing nothing, why would they be wicked? If they are deprived of our
coarse senses, and all their happiness is in the contemplation of the beings, they
would be able to will only the good; and can anyone who ceases to be wicked be
miserable forever? This is what I am inclined to believe without making an effort
to come to a decision about it. O clement and good Being, whatever Your decrees
are, I worship them! If You punish the wicked, I annihilate my weak reason before
Your justice. But if the remorse of these unfortunates is to be extinguished in
time, if their ills are to end, and if the same place awaits us all equally one
day, I praise You for it. Is not the wicked man my brother? How many times have I
been tempted to be like him? If, when he is delivered from his misery, he also
loses
* Not for us, not for us, Lord, But for Your name, but for Your own honor, O God,
make us live again! M
Psalm 115
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the malignity accompanying it, let him be happy as I am. Far from arousing my
jealousy, his happiness will only add to mine.
In this way, contemplating God in His works and studying Him by those of His
attributes which it matters for me to know, I have succeeded in extending and
increasing by degrees the initially imperfect and limited idea I had of this
immense Being. But if this idea has become nobler and greater, it is also less
proportionate to human reason. As my mind approaches the eternal light, its
brilliance dazzles and confuses me, and I am forced to abandon all the terrestrial
notions which helped me to imagine it. God is no longer corporeal and sensible. The
supreme intelligence which rules the world is no longer the world itself. I lift
and fatigue my mind in vain to conceive His essence. When I think that it is what
gives life and activity to the living and active substance that rules animate
bodies, when I hear it said that my soul is spiritual and that God is a spirit, I
am indignant about this debasement of the divine essence. As if God and my soul
were of the same nature! As if God were not the only absolute being, the only one
that is truly active, sensing, thinking, willing by itself, and from which we get
thought, sentiment, activity, will, freedom, and being. We are free only because He
wants us to be, and His inexplicable substance is to our souls what our souls are
to our bodies. I know nothing about whether He created matter, bodies, minds, and
the world. The idea of creation confuses me and is out of my reach. I believe it
insofar as I can conceive it. But I do know that He formed the universe and all
that exists, that He made everything, ordered everything. God is doubtless eternal;
but can my mind embrace the idea of eternity? Why fob myself off with words
unrelated to an idea? What I do conceive is that He exists before things, that He
will exist as long as they subsist, and that He would exist even after that, if all
were to end one day. That a being which I cannot conceive of gives existence to
other beings is only obscure and incomprehensible; but that being and nothingness
turn themselves into one another on their own is a palpable contradiction, a clear
absurdity.
God is intelligent, but in what way? Man is intelligent when he reasons, and the
supreme intelligence does not need to reason. For it there are neither premises nor
conclusions; there are not even propositions. It is purely intuitive; it sees
equally everything which is and everything which can be. For it all truths are only
a single idea, as all places are a single point, and all times a single moment.
Human power acts by means; divine power acts by itself. God can because He wills.
His will causes His power. God is good; nothing is more manifest. But goodness in
man is the love of his fellows, and the goodness of God is the love of order; for
it is by order that He maintains what exists and links each part with the whole.
God is just, I am convinced of it; it is a consequence of His goodness. The
injustice of men is their work and not His. Moral disorder, which gives witness
against providence in the eyes of the philosophers, only serves to demonstrate it
in mine. But man's justice is to give each what belongs to him, and God's justice
is to ask from each for an accounting of what He gave him.
If I have just discovered successively these attributes of which I have
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no absolute idea, I have done so by compulsory inferences, by the good use of my
reason. But I affirm them without understanding them, and at bottom that is to
affirm nothing. I may very well tell myself, "God is thus; I sense it, I prove it
to myself." I cannot conceive any the better how God can be thus.
Finally, the more effort I make to contemplate His infinite essence, the less I can
conceive it. But it is; that is enough for me. The less I can conceive it, the more
I worship it. I humble myself and say to Him, "Being of beings, I am because You
are; it is to lift myself up to my source to meditate on You ceaselessly. The
worthiest use of my reason is for it to annihilate itself before You. It is my
rapture of mind, it is the charm of my weakness to feel myself overwhelmed by Your
greatness."
After having thus deduced the principal truths that it mattered for me to know from
the impression of sensible objects and from the inner sentiment that leads me to
judge of causes according to my natural lights, I still must investigate what
manner of conduct I ought to draw from these truths and what rules I ought to
prescribe for myself in order to fulfill my destiny on earth according to the
intention of Him who put me there. In continuing to follow my method, I do not draw
these rules from the principles of a high philosophy, but find them written by
nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart. I have only to
consult myself about what I want to do. Everything I sense to be good is good;
everything I sense to be bad is bad. The best of all casuists is the conscience;
and it is only when one haggles with it that one has recourse to the subtleties of
reasoning. The first of all cares is the care for oneself. Nevertheless how many
times does the inner voice tell us that, in doing our good at another's expense, we
do wrong! We believe we are following the impulse of nature, but we are resisting
it. In listening to what it says to our senses, we despise what it says to our
hearts; the active being obeys, the passive being commands. Conscience is the voice
of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body. Is it surprising that these
two languages often are contradictory? And then which should be listened to? Too
often reason deceives us. We have acquired only too much right to challenge it. But
conscience never deceives; it is man's true guide. It is to the soul what instinct
is to the body; * he who follows conscience obeys nature and
* Modern philosophy, accepting only what it explains, is careful not to accept that
obscure faculty called instinct, which appears without any acquired knowledge to
guide animals toward some end. Instinct, according to one of our wisest
philosophers,51 is only a habit without reflection which is, however, acquired by
reflecting; and from the way he explains this development, it ought to be concluded
that children reflect more than men, a paradox strange enough to deserve the effort
of examination. Without going into this discussion here, I ask what name I ought to
give to the ardor with which my dog makes war on moles he does not eat, to the
patience with which he sometimes watches for them for whole hours, and to the skill
with which he grabs them, throws them out on the earth the moment they push up, and
then kills them, only to leave them there, without anyone ever having trained him
for this hunt and taught him moles were there? I ask further—and this is more
important—why, the first time I threatened this same dog, he lay with his back on
the ground, his paws bent back in a supplicant attitude, the one most suited to
touch me, a posture he would have certainly not kept if, without letting myself be
moved, I had beaten him in this position? What! Had my dog, still very
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does not fear being led astray. This point is important [continued my benefactor,
seeing that I was going to interrupt him]. Allow me to tarry a bit to clarify it.
All the morality of our actions is in the judgment we ourselves make of them. If it
is true that the good is good, it must be so in the depths of our hearts as it is
in our works, and the primary reward for justice is to sense that one practices it.
If moral goodness is in conformity with our nature, man could be healthy of spirit
or well constituted only to the extent that he is good. If it is not and man is
naturally wicked, he cannot cease to be so without being corrupted, and goodness in
him is only a vice contrary to nature. If he were made to do harm to his kind, as a
wolf is made to slaughter his prey, a humane man would be an animal as depraved as
a pitying wolf, and only virtue would leave us with remorse.
Let us return to ourselves, my young friend! Let us examine, all personal interest
aside, where our inclinations lead us. Which spectacle gratifies us more—that of
others' torments or that of their happiness? Which is sweeter to do and leaves us
with a more agreeable impression after having done it—a beneficent act or a wicked
act? In whom do you take an interest in your theaters? Is it in heinous crimes that
you take pleasure? Is it to their authors when they are punished that you give your
tears? It is said that we are indifferent to everything outside of our interest;
but, all to the contrary, the sweetness of friendship and of humanity consoles us
in our suffering; even in our pleasures we would be too alone, too miserable, if we
had no one with whom to share them. If there is nothing moral in the heart of man,
what is the source of these transports of admiration for heroic actions, these
raptures of love for great souls? What relation does this enthusiasm for virtue
have to our private interest? Why would I want to be Cato, who disembowels himself,
rather than Caesar triumphant? Take this love of the beautiful from our hearts, and
you take all the charm from life. He whose vile passions have stifled these
delicious sentiments in his narrow soul, and who, by dint of self-centeredness,
succeeds in loving only himself, has no more transports. His icy heart no longer
palpitates with joy; a sweet tenderness never moistens his eyes; he has no more joy
in anything. This unfortunate man no longer feels, no longer lives. He is already
dead.
But however numerous the wicked are on the earth, there are few of these cadaverous
souls who have become insensitive, except where their own interest is at stake, to
everything which is just and good. Iniquity pleases only to the extent one profits
from it; in all the rest one wants the innocent to be protected. One sees some act
of violence
little and practically just born, already acquired moral ideas? Did he know what
clemency and generosity are? On the basis of what acquired understanding did he
hope to mollify me by thus abandoning himself to my discretion? Every dog in the
world does pretty nearly the same thing in the same situation, and I am saying
nothing here that cannot be verified by everyone. Let the philosophers who so
disdainfully reject instinct be so good as to explain this fact by the mere action
of the sensations and the knowledge they cause us to acquire. Let them explain it
in a way satisfying to every man of good sense. Then I shall have nothing more to
say, and I shall no longer speak of instinct.
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and injustice in the street or on the road. Instantly an emotion of anger and
indignation is aroused in the depths of the heart, and it leads us to take up the
defense of the oppressed; but a more powerful duty restrains us, and the laws take
from us the right of protecting innocence. On the other hand, if some act of
clemency or generosity strikes our eyes, what admiration, what love it inspires in
us! Who does not say to himself, "I would like to i,ave done the same"? It is
surely of very little importance to us that a man was wicked or just two thousand
years ago; nevertheless, we take an interest in ancient history just as if it all
had taken place in our day. What do Catiline's crimes do to me? Am I afraid of
being his victim? Why, then, am I as horrified by him as if he were my
contemporary? We do not hate the wicked only because they do us harm, but because
they are wicked. Not only do we want to be happy; we also wish for the happiness of
others. And when this happiness does not come at the expense of our own, it
increases it. Finally, in spite of oneself, one pities the unfortunate; when we are
witness to their ills, we suffer from them. The most perverse are unable to lose
this inclination entirely. Often it puts them in contradiction with themselves. The
robber who plunders passers-by still covers the nakedness of the poor, and the most
ferocious killer supports a fainting man.
We speak of the cry of remorse which in secret punishes hidden crimes and so often
brings them to light. Alas, who of us has never heard this importunate voice? We
speak from experience, and we would like to stifle this tyrannical sentiment that
gives us so much torment. Let us obey nature. We shall know with what gentleness it
reigns, and what charm one finds, after having hearkened to it, in giving favorable
testimony on our own behalf. The wicked man fears and flees himself. He cheers
himself up by rushing outside of himself. His restless eyes rove around him and
seek an object that is entertaining to him. Without bitter satire, without
insulting banter, he would always be sad. The mocking laugh is his only pleasure.
By contrast, the serenity of the just man is internal. His is not a malignant laugh
but a joyous one; he bears its source in himself. He is as gay alone as in the
midst of a circle. He does not draw his contentment from those who come near him;
he communicates it to them.
Cast your eyes on all the nations of the world, go through all the histories. Among
so many inhuman and bizarre cults, among this prodigious diversity of morals and
characters, you will find everywhere the same ideas of justice and decency,
everywhere the same notions of good and bad. Ancient paganism gave birth to
abominable gods who would have been punished on earth as villains and who presented
a picture of supreme happiness consisting only of heinous crimes to commit and
passions to satisfy. But vice, armed with a sacred authority, descended in vain
from the eternal abode; moral instinct repulsed it from the heart of human beings.
While celebrating Jupiter's debauches, they admired Xenocrates' continence. The
chaste Lucretia worshiped the lewd Venus. The intrepid Roman sacrificed to fear. He
invoked the god who mutilated his father, and he himself died without a murmur at
his own father's hand. The most contemptible divinities were served by the greatest
men. The holy voice of nature, stronger than that of the
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gods, made itself respected on earth and seemed to relegate crime, along with the
guilty, to heaven.
There is in the depths of souls, then, an innate principle of justice and virtue
according to which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge our actions and those of
others as good or bad. It is to this principle that I give the name conscience.
But at this word I hear the clamor of those who are allegedly wise rising on all
sides: errors of childhood, prejudices of education, they all cry in a chorus.
Nothing exists in the human mind other than what is introduced by experience, and
we judge a thing on no ground other than that of acquired ideas. They go farther.
They dare to reject this evident and universal accord of all nations. And in the
face of this striking uniformity in men's judgment, they go and look in the shadows
for some obscure example known to them alone—as if all the inclinations of nature
were annihilated by the depravity of a single people, and the species were no
longer anything as soon as there are monsters. But what is the use of the torments
to which the skeptic Montaigne subjects himself in order to unearth in some corner
of the world a custom opposed to the notions of justice? Of what use is it to him
to give to the most suspect travelers the authority he refuses to give to the most
celebrated writers? r>- Will some uncertain and bizarre practices, based on local
causes unknown to us, destroy the general induction drawn from the concurrence of
all peoples, who disagree about everything else and agree on this point alone? O
Montaigne, you who pride yourself on frankness and truth, be sincere and true, if a
philosopher can be, and tell me whether there is some country on earth where it is
a crime to keep one's faith, to be clement, beneficent, and generous, where the
good man is contemptible and the perfidious one honored?
It is said that everyone contributes to the public good for his own interest. But
what then is the source of the just man's contributing to it to his prejudice? What
is going to one's death for one's interest? No doubt, no one acts for anything
other than for his good; but if there is not a moral good which must be taken into
account, one will never explain by private interest anything but the action of the
wicked. It is not even likely that anyone will attempt to go farther. This would be
too abominable a philosophy—one which is embarrassed by virtuous actions, which
could get around the difficulty only by fabricating base intentions and motives
without virtue, which would be forced to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus. If
ever such doctrines could spring up among us, the voice of nature as well as that
of reason would immediately be raised against them and would never leave a single
one of their partisans the excuse that he is of good faith.
It is not my design here to enter into metaphysical discussions which are out of my
reach and yours, and which, at bottom, lead to nothing. I have already told you
that I wanted not to philosophize with you but to help you consult your heart. Were
all the philosophers to prove that I am wrong, if you sense that I am right, I do
not wish for more.
For that purpose I need only to make you distinguish our acquired ideas from our
natural sentiments; for we sense before knowing, and
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since we do not learn to want what is good for us and to flee what is bad for us
but rather get this will from nature, by that very fact love of the good and hatred
of the bad are as natural as the love of ourselves. The acts of the conscience are
not judgments but sentiments. Although all our ideas come to us from outside, the
sentiments evaluating them are within us, and it is by them alone that we know the
compatibility or incompatibility between us and the things we ought to seek or
flee.
To exist, for us, is to sense; our sensibility is incontestably anterior to our
intelligence, and we had sentiments before ideas. Whatever the cause of our being,
it has provided for our preservation by giving us sentiments suitable to our
nature, and it could not be denied that these, at least, are innate. These
sentiments, as far as the individual is concerned, are the love of self, the fear
of pain, the horror of death, the desire of well-being. But if, as cannot be
doubted, man is by his nature sociable, or at least made to become so, he can be so
only by means of other innate sentiments relative to his species; for if we
consider only physical need, it ought certainly to disperse men instead of bringing
them together. It is from the moral system formed by this double relation to
oneself and to one's fellows that the impulse of conscience is born. To know the
good is not to love it; man does not have innate knowledge of it, but as soon as
his reason makes him know it, his conscience leads him to love it. It is this
sentiment which is innate.
Thus I do not believe, my friend, that it is impossible to explain, by the
consequences of our nature, the immediate principle of the conscience independently
of reason itself. And were that impossible, it would moreover not be necessary;
for, those who deny this principle, admitted and recognized by all mankind, do not
prove that it does not exist but are satisfied with affirming that it does not; so
when we affirm that it does exist, we are just as well founded as they are, and we
have in addition the inner witness and the voice of conscience, which testifies on
its own behalf. If the first glimmers of judgment dazzle us and at first make a
blur of objects in our sight, let us wait for our weak eyes to open up again and
steady themselves, and soon we shall see these same objects again in the light of
reason as nature first showed them to us. Or, rather, let us be more simple and
less vain. Let us limit ourselves to the first sentiments that we find in
ourselves, since study always leads us back to them when it has not led us astray.
Conscience, conscience! Divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice, certain
guide of a being that is ignorant and limited but intelligent and free; infallible
judge of good and bad which makes man like unto God; it is you who make the
excellence of his nature and the morality of his actions. Without you I sense
nothing in me that raises me above the beasts, other than the sad privilege of
leading myself astray from error to error with the aid of an understanding without
rule and a reason without principle.
Thank heaven, we are delivered from all that terrifying apparatus of philosophy. We
can be men without being scholars. Dispensed from consuming our life in the study
of morality, we have at less expense a more certain guide in this immense maze of
human opinions. But it is not enough that this guide exists; one must know how to
recognize it
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and to follow it. If it speaks to all hearts, then why are there so few of them who
hear it? Well, this is because it speaks to us in nature's language, which
everything has made us forget. Conscience is timid; it likes refuge and peace. The
world and noise scare it; the prejudices from which they claim it is born are its
cruelest enemies. It flees or keeps quiet before them. Their noisy voices stifle
its voice and prevent it from making itself heard. Fanaticism dares to counterfeit
it and to dictate crime in its name. It finally gives up as a result of being
dismissed. It no longer speaks to us. It no longer responds to us. And after such
long contempt for it, to recall it costs as much as banishing it did.
How many times in my researches have I grown weary as a result of the coldness I
felt within me! How many times have sadness and boredom, spreading their poison
over my first meditations, made them unbearable for me! My arid heart provided only
a languid and lukewarm zeal to the love of truth. I said to myself, "Why torment
myself in seeking what is not? Moral good is only a chimera. There is nothing good
but the pleasures of the senses." O, when one has once lost the taste for the
pleasures of the soul, how difficult it is to regain it! How much more difficult
gaining it is when one has never had it! If there existed a man miserable enough to
be unable to recall anything he had done in all his life which made him satisfied
with himself and glad to have lived, that man would be incapable of ever knowing
himself; and for want of feeling the goodness suitable to his nature, he would
necessarily remain wicked and be eternally unhappy. But do you believe there is a
single man on the whole earth depraved enough never to have yielded in his heart to
the temptation of doing good? This temptation is so natural and so sweet that it is
impossible always to resist it, and the memory of the pleasure that it once
produced suffices to recall it constantly. Unfortunately it is at first hard to
satisfy. One has countless reasons to reject the inclination of one's heart. False
prudence confines it within the limits of the human I; countless efforts of courage
are needed to dare to cross those limits. To enjoy doing good is the reward for
having done good, and this reward is obtained only after having deserved it.
Nothing is more lovable than virtue, but one must possess it to find it so. Virtue
is similar to Proteus in the fable: when one wants to embrace it, it at first takes
on countless terrifying forms and finally reveals itself in its own form only to
those who did not let go.
Constantly caught up in the combat between my natural sentiments, which spoke for
the common interest, and my reason, which related everything to me, I would have
drifted all my life in this continual alternation—doing the bad, loving the good,
always in contradiction with myself—if new lights had not illuminated my heart, and
if the truth, which settled my opinions, had not also made my conduct certain and
put me in agreement with myself. For all that one might want to establish virtue by
reason alone, what solid base can one give it? Virtue, they say, is the love of
order. But can and should this love win out in me over that of my own well-being?
Let them give me a clear and sufficient reason for preferring it. At bottom, their
alleged principle is a pure play on words; for I say that vice is the love of
order, taken in a different sense. There is some moral order wherever there
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is sentiment and intelligence. The difference is that the good man orders himself
in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to
himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things; the former measures his
radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is ordered in relation to the common
center, which is God, and in relation to all the concentric circles, which are the
creatures. If the divinity does not exist, it is only the wicked man who reasons,
and the good man is nothing but a fool.
O my child! May you one day sense what a weight one is relieved of when, after
having exhausted the vanity of human opinions and tasted the bitterness of the
passions, one finally finds so near to oneself the road of wisdom, the reward of
this life's labors, and the source of the happiness of which one has despaired. All
the duties of the natural law, which were almost erased from my heart by the
injustice of men, are recalled to it in the name of the eternal justice which
imposes them on me and sees me fulfill them. I no longer sense that I am anything
but the work and the instrument of the great Being who wants what is good, who does
it, and who will do what is good for me through the conjunction of my will and His
and through the good use of my liberty. I acquiesce in the order that this Being
establishes, sure that one day I myself will enjoy this order and find my felicity
in it; for what felicity is sweeter than sensing that one is ordered in a system in
which everything is good? Subject to pain, I bear it with patience in thinking that
it is fleeting and that it comes from a body that does not belong to me. If I do a
good deed without a witness, I know that it is seen, and I make a record for the
other life of my conduct in this one. In suffering an injustice, I say to myself,
"The just Being who rules everything will certainly know how to compensate me for
it." The needs of my body and the miseries of my life make the idea of death more
bearable for me. They will be so many fewer bonds to break when it is necessary to
leave everything.
Why is my soul subjected to my senses and chained to this body which enslaves it
and interferes with it? I know nothing about it. Did I take part in God's decrees?
But I can, without temerity, form modest conjectures. I tell myself: "If man's mind
had remained free and pure, what merit would he gain from loving and following the
order which he saw established and which he would have no interest in troubling? He
would be happy, it is true. But his happiness would be lacking the most sublime
degree, the glory of virtue and the good witness of oneself. He would be only like
the angels, and doubtless the virtuous man will be more than they are. He is united
to a mortal body by a bond no less powerful than incomprehensible. The care for
this body's preservation incites the soul to relate everything to the body and
gives it an interest contrary to the general order, which the soul is nevertheless
capable of seeing and loving. It is then that the good use of the soul's liberty
becomes both its merit and its recompense, and that it prepares itself an
incorruptible happiness in combating its terrestrial passions and maintaining
itself in its first will."
If, even in the state of abasement which we are in during this life,
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all our first inclinations are legitimate, and if all our vices come to us from
ourselves, why do we complain of being subjugated by them? Why do we reproach the
Author of things for the evils we do to ourselves and the enemies we arm against
ourselves? Ah, let us not corrupt man! He will always be good without difficulty
and always be happy without remorse! The guilty who say they are forced to crime
are as dishonest as they are wicked. How is it they do not see that the weakness of
which they complain is their own work; that their first depravity comes from their
own will; that by willing to yield to their temptations, they finally yield to them
in spite of themselves and make them irresistible? It is doubtless no longer in
their power not to be wicked and weak; but not becoming so was in their power. Oh
how easily we would remain masters of ourselves and of our passions—even during
this life—if when our habits were not yet acquired, when our mind was beginning to
open, we knew how to occupy it with the objects that it ought to know in order to
evaluate those which it does not know; if we sincerely wanted to enlighten
ourselves—not to be conspicuous in others' eyes, but to be good and wise according
to our nature, to make ourselves happy in practicing our duties! This study appears
boring and painful to us because we think about it only when we are already
corrupted by vice, already given over to our passions. We settle our judgments and
our esteem before knowing good and bad, and then, in relating everything to this
false measure, we give to nothing its just value.
There is an age when the heart is still free, but ardent, restless, avid for the
happiness it does not know; it seeks it with a curiosity born of incertitude and,
deceived by the senses, finally settles on a vain image of happiness and believes
it has found it where it is not. These illusions have lasted too long for me. Alas,
I recognized them too late and have been unable to destroy them completely. They
will last as long as this mortal body which causes them. At least, although they
may very well seduce me, they no longer deceive me. I know them for what they are;
in following them, I despise them. Far from seeing them as the object of my
happiness, I see them as its obstacle. I aspire to the moment when, after being
delivered from the shackles of the body, I shall be me without contradiction or
division and shall need only myself in order to be happy. While waiting, I am
already happy in this life because I take little account of all its ills, because I
regard it as almost foreign to my being, and because all the true good that I can
get out of it depends on me.
To raise myself beforehand as much as possible to this condition of happiness,
strength, and freedom, I practice sublime contemplations. I meditate on the order
of the universe, not in order to explain it by vain systems but to admire it
constantly, to worship the wise Author who makes himself felt in it. I converse
with Him; I fill all my faculties with His divine essence; I am moved by His
benefactions; I bless Him for his gifts. But I do not pray to Him. What would I ask
of Him? That He change the course of things for me, that He perform miracles in my
favor? I who ought to love, above all, the order established by His
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wisdom and maintained by His providence, would I want this order to be disturbed
for me? No, this rash wish would deserve to be punished rather than fulfilled. Nor
do I ask Him for the power to do good. Why ask Him for what He has given me? Did He
not give me conscience for loving the good, reason for knowing it, and liberty for
choosing it? If I do the bad, I have no excuse. I do it because I want to. To ask
Him to change my will is to ask Him what He asks of me. It is to want Him to do my
work while I collect the wages for it. Not to be contented with my condition is to
want no longer to be a man, it is to want something other than what is, it is to
want disorder and evil. Source of justice and truth, God, clement and good, in my
confidence in You, the supreme wish of my heart is that Your will be done! In
joining my will to Yours, I do what you do; I acquiesce in Your goodness; I believe
that I share beforehand in the supreme felicity which is its reward.
As I justly distrust myself, the only thing that I ask of Him, or rather that I
expect of His justice, is to correct my error if I am led astray and if this error
is dangerous to me. The fact that I act in good faith does not mean I believe
myself infallible. Those of my opinions which seem truest to me are perhaps so many
lies; for what man does not hold on to his opinions, and how many men agree about
everything? The illusion deceiving me may very well come from myself; it is He
alone who can cure me of it. I have done what I could to attain the truth, but its
source is too elevated. If the strength for going farther is lacking to me, of what
can I be guilty? It is up to the truth to come nearer.
The good priest had spoken with vehemence. He was moved, and so was I. I believed I
was hearing the divine Orpheus sing the first hymns and teaching men the worship of
the gods. Nevertheless I saw a multitude of objections to make to him. I did not
make any of them, because they were less solid than disconcerting, and
persuasiveness was on his side. To the extent that he spoke to me according to his
conscience, mine seemed to confirm what he had told me.
The sentiments you have just expounded to me, I said to him, appear more novel in
what you admit you do not know than in what you say you believe. I see in them
pretty nearly the theism or the natural religion that the Christians pretend to
confound with atheism or ir-religiousness, which is the directly contrary doctrine.
But in the present condition of my faith I have to ascend rather than descend in
order to adopt your opinions, and I find it difficult to remain precisely at the
point where you are without being as wise as you. In order to be at least as
sincere as you, I want to take counsel with myself. Following your example, I ought
to be guided by the inner sentiment. You yourself have taught me that, after one
has long imposed silence on it, to recall it is not the business of a moment. I
will carry your discourse with me in my heart. I must meditate on it. If after
taking careful counsel with myself, I remain as convinced of it as you are, you
will be my final apostle, and I shall be your proselyte unto death. Continue,
however, to instruct me. You have only told me half of what I must know. Speak to
me of revelation, of the scriptures, of those obscure dogmas through which I have
been wandering since childhood,
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without being able either to conceive or to believe them and without knowing how I
could either accept or reject them.
Yes, my child, he said, embracing me, I shall finish telling you what I think. I do
not want to open my heart to you halfway. But the desire you give evidence of was
necessary to authorize my having no reserve with you. I have told you nothing up to
now which I did not believe could be useful to you and of which I was not
profoundly persuaded. The examination which remains to be made is very different. I
see in it only perplexity, mystery, and obscurity. I bring to it only uncertainty
and distrust. I decide only in trembling, and I tell you my doubts rather than my
opinions. If your sentiments were more stable, I would hesitate to expound mine to
you. But in your present condition you will profit from thinking as I do.*
Moreover, attribute to my discourse only the authority of reason. I do not know
whether I am in error. It is difficult in discussion not to adopt an assertive tone
sometimes. But remember that all my assertions here are only reasons for doubt.
Seek the truth yourself. As for me, I promise you only good faith.
You see in my exposition only natural religion. It is very strange that any other
is needed! How shall I know this necessity? What can I be guilty of in serving God
according to the understanding He gives to my mind and the sentiments He inspires
in my heart? What purity of morality, what dogma useful to man and honorable to his
Author can I derive from a positive doctrine which I cannot derive without it from
the good use of my faculties? Show me what one can add, for the glory of God, for
the good of society, and for my own advantage, to the duties of the natural law,
and what virtue you produce from a new form of worship that is not a result of
mine? The greatest ideas of the divinity come to us from reason alone. View the
spectacle of nature; hear the inner voice. Has God not told everything to our eyes,
to our conscience, to our judgment? What more will men tell us? Their revelations
have only the effect of degrading God by giving Him human passions. I see that
particular dogmas, far from clarifying the notions of the great Being, confuse
them; that far from ennobling them, they debase them; that to the inconceivable
mysteries surrounding the great Being they add absurd contradictions; that they
make man proud, intolerant, and cruel; that, instead of establishing peace on
earth, they bring sword and fire to it. I ask myself what good all this does,
without knowing what to answer. I see in it only the crimes of men and the miseries
of mankind.
I am told that a revelation was needed to teach men the way God wanted to be
served. They present as proof the diversity of bizarre forms of worship which have
been instituted, and do not see that this very diversity comes from the
fancifulness M of revelations. As soon as peoples took it into their heads to make
God speak, each made Him speak in its own way and made Him say what it wanted. If
one had listened only to what God says to the heart of man, there would never have
been more than one religion on earth.
* This is, I believe, what the good vicar could say to the public at present.
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There had to be uniformity of worship. Very well. But was this point so important
that the whole apparatus of divine power was needed to establish it? Let us not
confuse the ceremony of religion with religion itself. The worship God asks for is
that of the heart. And that worship, when it is sincere, is always uniform. One
must be possessed of a mad vanity indeed to imagine that God takes so great an
interest in the form of the priest's costume, in the order of the words he
pronounces, in the gestures he makes at the altar, and in all his genuflexions. Ah,
my friend, remain upright! You will always be near enough to the earth. God wants
to be revered in spirit and in truth. This is the duty of all religions, all
countries, all men. As to the external worship, if it must be uniform for the sake
of good order, that is purely a question of public policy; no revelation is needed
for that.
I did not begin with all these reflections. I was carried along by the prejudices
of education and by that dangerous amour-propre which always wants to carry man
above his sphere, and, unable to raise my feeble conceptions up to the great Being,
I made an effort to lower Him down to my level. I reduced the infinite distance He
has put in the relations between His nature and mine. I wanted more immediate
communications, more particular instructions; not content with making God like man,
I wanted supernatural understanding in order that I myself would be privileged
among my fellows, I wanted an exclusive form of worship; I wanted God to have said
to me what He had not said to others, or what others had not understood in the same
way as I did.
Regarding the point at which I had arrived as the common point from which all
believers start in order to arrive at a more enlightened form of worship, I found
nothing in natural religion but the elements of every religion. I considered this
diversity of sects which reign on earth, and which accuse each other of lying and
error. I asked, "Which is the right one?" Each answered, "It is mine." * Each said,
"I and my partisans alone think rightly; all the others are in error." "And how do
you know that your sect is the right one?" "Because God said so." "And who told you
that God said so?" "My pastor, who certainly knows. My pastor told me this is what
to believe, and this is what I believe. He assures me that all those who say
something other than he does are lying, and I do not listen to them."
What, I thought, is the truth not one, and can what is true for me
* A good and wise priest says: All say that they get it and believe it (and all use
this jargon) not from men nor from any creature but from God.
But to tell the truth without any flattery or disguise, there is nothing to it.
Religions are, whatever is said, gotten from human hands and by human means.
Witness first the way religions were and still are received every day in the world
by individuals: nation, country, and place give religion. One belongs to the
religion observed in the place where one is born and raised. We are circumcised,
baptised, Jews, Mohammedans, Christians before we know that we are men. Religion is
not of our choice and election. Witness next how ways of life and morals are in
such poor agreement with religion. Witness that on human and very slight occasions
one goes counter to the tenor of one's religion. [Charron, de la Sagesse, vol. II,
chap. 5, p. 257, Bordeaux edition 1601.] It appears very much as though the sincere
profession of faith of the virtuous
theologal of Condam would not have been very different from that of the Savoyard
Vicar.5*
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be false for you? If the methods of the man who follows the right road and of the
man who goes astray are the same, what merit or what fault belongs to one of these
men more than the other? Their choice is the effect of chance; to blame them for it
is iniquitous. It is to reward or punish them for being born in this or in that
country. To dare to say that God judges us in this way is to insult His justice.
Either all religions are good and agreeable to God; or if there is one which He
prescribes to men and punishes them for refusing to recognize, He has given it
certain and manifest signs so that it is distinguished and known as the only true
one. These signs exist in all times and all places, equally to be grasped by all
men, great and small, learned and ignorant, Europeans, Indians, Africans, savages.
If there were a religion on earth outside of whose worship there was only eternal
suffering, and if in some place in the world a single mortal of good faith had not
been struck by its obviousness, the God of that religion would be the most
iniquitous and cruel of tyrants.
Are we, then, sincerely seeking the truth? Let us grant nothing to the right of
birth and to the authority of fathers and pastors, but let us recall for the
examination of conscience and reason all that they have taught us from our youth.
They may very well cry out, "Subject your reason." He who deceives me can say as
much. I need reasons for subjecting my reason.
All the theology that I can acquire on my own from the inspection of the universe
and by the good use of my faculties is limited to what I have explained to you
previously. To know more one must have recourse to extraordinary means. These means
could not be the authority of men; for since no man belongs to a different species
from me, all that a man knows naturally I too can know, and another man can be
mistaken as well as I. When I believe what he says, it is not because he says it
but because he proves it. Therefore the testimony of men is at bottom only that of
my own reason and adds nothing to the natural means God gave me for knowing the
truth.
Apostle of the truth, what then have you to tell me of which I do not remain the
judge? "God Himself has spoken. Hear His revelation." That is something else. God
has spoken! That is surely a great statement. To whom has He spoken? "He has spoken
to men." Why, then, did I hear nothing about it? "He has directed other men to give
you His word." I understand: it is men who are going to tell me what God has said.
I should have preferred to have heard God Himself. It would have cost Him nothing
more, and I would have been sheltered from seduction. "He gives you a guarantee in
making manifest the mission of his messengers." How is that? "By miracles." And
where are these miracles? "In books." And who wrote these books? "Men." And who saw
these miracles? "Men who attest to them." What! Always human testimony? Always men
who report to me what other men have reported! So many men between God and me!
Nevertheless let us see, examine, compare, verify. Oh, if God had deigned to
relieve me of all this labor, would I have served him any less heartily?
Consider, my friend, in what a horrible discussion I am now engaged, what immense
erudition I need to go back to the most remote antiquity
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—to examine, weigh, and compare the prophecies, the revelations, the facts, all the
monuments of faith put forth in every country of the world, to fix times, places,
authors, occasions! What critical precision is necessary for me to distinguish the
authentic documents from the forged ones; to compare the objections to the
responses, the translations to the originals; to judge of the impartiality of
witnesses, of their good sense, of their understanding; to know whether anything
has been suppressed, anything added, anything transposed, changed, falsified; to
resolve the contradictions which remain; to judge what weight should be given to
the silence of adversaries concerning facts alleged against them; whether these
allegations were known to them; whether they took them seriously enough to deign to
respond; whether books were common enough for ours to reach them; whether we have
been of good enough faith to allow their books to circulate among us and to let
remain their strongest objections just as they made them.
Once all these monuments are recognized as incontestable, one must next move on to
the proofs of their authors' mission. One must have a good knowledge of all of the
following: the laws of probability and the likelihood of events, in order to judge
which predictions cannot be fulfilled without a miracle; the particular genius of
the original languages, in order to distinguish what is prediction in these
languages and what is only figure of speech; which facts belong to the order of
nature and which other facts do not, so as to be able to say to what extent a
skillful man can fascinate the eyes of simple people and can amaze even enlightened
ones; how to discern to which species a miracle ought to belong and what
authenticity it ought to have—not only for it to be believed, but for it to be a
punishable offense to doubt it; how to compare the proof of true and false miracles
and how to find certain rules for discerning them; and, finally, how to explain why
God chose, for attesting to His word, means which themselves have so great a need
of attestation, as though He were playing on men's credulity and intentionally
avoiding the true means of persuading them.
Let us suppose that the divine Majesty were to deign to lower itself sufficiently
to make a man the organ of its sacred will. Is it reasonable, is it just to demand
that all of mankind obey the voice of this minister without making him known to it
as such? Is there equity in providing this minister as his only credentials some
special signs given to a few obscure people, signs of which all the rest of men
will never know anything except by hearsay? In every country in the world, if one
were to accept the truth of all the miracles which the people and the simple folk
say they have seen, every sect would be the right one; there would be more miracles
than natural events, and the greatest of all miracles would be if there were not
miracles wherever fanatics are persecuted. It is the unalterable order of nature
which best shows the Supreme Being. If many exceptions took place, I would no
longer know what to think; and as for me, I believe too much in God to believe in
so many miracles that are so little worthy of Him.
Let a man come and use this language with us: "Mortals, I announce the will of the
Most High to you. Recognize in my voice Him who sends me. I order the sun to change
its course, the stars to form another
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arrangement, the mountains to become level, the waters to rise up, the earth to
change its aspect." At these marvels who will not instantly recognize the Master of
nature? It does not obey impostors. Their miracles are worked at crossroads, in
deserts, within the confines of a room; it is there that they have an easy time
with a small number of spectators already disposed to believe everything. Who will
dare to tell me how many eyewitnesses are needed in order to make a miracle worthy
of faith? If your miracles, which are performed to prove your doctrine, themselves
need to be proved, of what use are they? You might as well perform none.
The most important examination of the proclaimed doctrine remains. For since those
who say that God performs miracles on earth also claim that the Devil sometimes
imitates them, we are no farther advanced than before, even with the best-attested
miracles; and since the magicians of Pharaoh dared, in the very presence of Moses,
to produce the same signs he did by God's express order, why would they not in his
absence have claimed, with the same credentials, the same authority? Thus, after
the doctrine has been proved by the miracle, the miracle has to be proved by the
doctrine,* for fear of taking the Demon's work for God's work. What do you think of
this vicious circle?
Doctrine coming from God ought to bear the sacred character of the divinity. Not
only should it clarify for us the confused ideas which reasoning draws in our mind,
but it should also propound a form of worship, a morality, and maxims that are
suitable to the attributes with which we conceive His essence on our own. If it
taught us only things that are absurd and without reason, if it inspired in us only
sentiments of aversion for our fellows and terror for ourselves, if it depicted for
us only a god who is angry, jealous, vengeful, partisan, one who hates men, a god
of war and battles always ready to destroy and strike down, always speaking of
torments and suffering, and boasting of punishing even the innocent, my heart would
not be attracted toward this terrible god, and I would take care not to give up the
natural religion for this one. For you surely see that one must necessarily choose.
Your God is not ours, I would say to its sectarians. He who begins by choosing a
single people for Himself and proscribing the rest of mankind is not the common
Father of men. He who destines the great majority of His
* This is explicit in countless passages of scripture, among others Deuteronomy 13,
where it is said that if a prophet proclaiming foreign gods confirms his speeches
by miracles and what he predicts comes to pass, far from paying any attention to
him, one ought to put this prophet to death. Thus, when pagans put to death
apostles proclaiming a foreign god and proving their mission by predictions and
miracles, I do not see what solid objection there was to the pagans which they
could not instantly turn back against us. Now, what is to be done in such a case?
One thing only. Return to reasoning, and leave aside the miracles. It would have
been better not to have had recourse to them. This is the simplest good sense,
which is obscured only by dint of distinctions that at the very least are quite
subtle. Subtleties in Christianity! But was Jesus Christ wrong then, to promise the
Kingdom of Heaven to the simple? Was he wrong, then, to begin the most beautiful of
his speeches by congratulating the poor in spirit, if so much spirit is needed to
understand his doctrine and to learn how to believe in him? When you have proved to
me that I ought to submit, all will be quite well. But to prove that to me, put
yourself within my reach. Measure your reasonings according to the capacity of a
poor spirit, or I no longer recognize in you the true disciple of your master, and
it is not his doctrine that you proclaim to me.
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creatures to eternal torment is not the clement and good God my reason has shown
me.
With respect to dogmas, my reason tells me that they ought to be clear, luminous,
and striking by their obviousness. If natural religion is insufficient, this is due
to the obscurity in which it leaves the great truths it teaches us. It is for
revelation to teach us these truths in a manner evident to man's mind, to put them
within his reach, to make him conceive them in order that he may believe them.
Faith is given certainty and solidity by the understanding. The best of all
religions is infallibly the clearest. He who burdens the worship he teaches me with
mysteries and contradictions teaches me thereby to distrust it. The God I worship
is not a god of shadows. He did not endow me with an understanding in order to
forbid me its use. To tell me to subject my reason is to insult its Author. The
minister of the truth does not tyrannize my reason; he enlightens it.
We have set aside all human authority, and without it I cannot see how one man can
convince another by preaching an unreasonable doctrine to him. Let us have these
two men confront each other for a moment and find out what they can say to one
another, using that harshness of language which is usual for the two parties.
the inspired man Reason teaches you that the whole is greater than
its part, but I teach you on behalf of God that it is the part which is
greater than the whole. the reasoner And who are you to dare tell me that God
contradicts
Himself, and whom would I prefer to believe—Him who teaches me
eternal truths by reason, or you who proclaim an absurdity on His
behalf? the inspired man Me, for my instruction is more positive, and I am
going to prove invincibly that it is He Who sends me. the reasoner How? You will
prove to me that it is God who sends
you to testify against Him? And what kind of proof will you use to
convince me that it is more certain that God speaks to me by your
mouth than by the understanding He gave me? the inspired man The understanding
He gave you! Small and vain
man! As if you were the first impious person led astray by his reason
corrupted by sin! the reasoner Nor would you, man of God, be the first imposter
who
gave his arrogance as proof of his mission. the inspired man What! Do
philosophers, too, indulge in insults? the reasoner Sometimes, when saints set
the example for them. the inspired man Oh, I have the right to. I speak on God's
behalf. the reasoner It would be well to show me your credentials before
making use of your privileges. the inspired man My credentials are authentic.
The earth and the
heavens will testify for me. Follow my reasonings carefully, I beg you. the
reasoner Your reasonings! You are not thinking. To teach me
that my reason deceives me, is that not to refute what it has said in
your favor? Whoever wants to impugn reason should convince others
without making use of it. For let us suppose that you have convinced
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me by reasoning; how will I know whether it is not my reason, corrupted by sin,
which makes me acquiesce to what you tell me? Moreover, what proof, what
demonstration will you ever be able to use that is more evident than the axiom it
is supposed to destroy? It is just as believable that a good syllogism is a lie as
it is that the part is greater than the whole.
the inspired man What a difference! My proofs are irrefutable. They belong to a
supernatural order.
the reasoner Supernatural! What does that word mean? I do not understand it.
the inspired man Changes in the order of nature, prophecies, miracles, wonders of
every sort.
the reasoner Wonders, miracles! I have never seen anything of the
kind. the inspired man Others have seen it for you. Crowds of witnesses,
the testimony of peoples . . .
the reasoner Is the testimony of peoples of a supernatural order?
the inspired man No, but when it is unanimous, it is incontestable.
the reasoner There is nothing more incontestable than the principles of reason, and
an absurdity cannot be made authoritative by the testimony of men. Once again, let
us see supernatural proofs, for the attestation of mankind is not such a proof.
the inspired man O hardened heart! Grace does not speak to you.
the reasoner It is not my fault, for, according to you, one must have already
received grace to be able to ask for it. Therefore, begin to speak to me in place
of it.
the inspired man Ah, that is what I am doing, and you do not hear me. But what do
you say of prophecies?
the reasoner I say, in the first place, that I have no more heard prophecies than I
have seen miracles. I say, moreover, that no prophecy could be an authority for me.
the inspired man Henchman of the Demon! And why are prophecies not an authority for
you?
the reasoner Because for them to be an authority three things would be required
whose coincidence is impossible: that is, that I was witness to the prophecy, that
I was witness to the event, and that it was demonstrated to me that this event
could not have tallied fortuitously with the prophecy. For even if a prophecy were
more precise, more clear, and more luminous than an axiom of geometry, the clarity
of a prediction made at random does not make its fulfillment impossible; and
therefore when that fulfillment does take place, it is not a strict proof of
anything about him who predicted it.
See, then, what your alleged supernatural proofs, your miracles and prophecies come
down to: a belief in all this on the faith of others, and a subjection of the
authority of God, speaking to my reason, to the authority of men. If the eternal
truths which my mind conceives could be impaired, there would no longer be any kind
of certainty for me, and far from being sure that you speak to me on behalf of God,
I would not even be sure that He exists.
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There are many difficulties here, my child, and these are not all. Among so many
diverse religions which mutually proscribe and exclude one another, a single one is
the right one, if indeed there is a right one. In order to recognize it, it is not
sufficient to examine one of them; they must all be examined, and in any matter
whatsoever one must not condemn without hearing.* The objections must be compared
to the proofs; it must be known what each objects to in the others, and what it
responds to their objections against itself. The more a sentiment appears to us to
have been demonstrated, the more we ought to try to find out the basis for so many
men's not finding it so. One would have to be quite simple to believe that it
suffices to hear the learned men of one's own party to inform oneself of the
arguments of the opposing party. Where are the theologians who pride themselves on
good faith? Where are those who, in order to refute the arguments of their
adversaries, do not begin by weakening them? Each shines in his own party; but one
who in the midst of his own people is proud of his proofs would cut a very foolish
figure with these same proofs among people of another party. Do you want to inform
yourself from books? What erudition must be acquired, how many languages must be
learned, how many libraries must be gone through, what an immense amount of reading
must be done! Who will guide me in the choice? It will be difficult to find in one
country the best books of the opposing party, and even more so those of all the
parties. If one were to find them, they would soon be refuted. The absent party is
always wrong, and poor arguments spoken with assurance easily efface good ones
expounded with contempt. Moreover, there is often nothing which is more deceptive
than books, and which renders less faithfully the sentiments of those who wrote
them. If you had wanted to judge the Catholic faith on the basis of Bossuet's
book,50 you would have discovered that you were wide of the mark after having lived
among us. You would have seen that the doctrine used to respond to the Protestants
is not the one taught to the people, and that Bossuet's book bears little
resemblance to the instructions of the sermon. In order to judge a religion well,
it is necessary not to study it in the books of its sectarians, but to go and learn
it amongst them. That is very different. Each religion has its traditions, its
views, its customs, and its prejudices which constitute the spirit of its belief
and must also be considered for it to be judged.
How many great peoples print no books and do not read ours! How can they judge our
opinions? How can we judge theirs? We scoff at them, they despise us; and if our
travelers ridicule them, they need only travel among us to return the favor. In
what country are there
* Plutarch reports that the Stoics maintained, among other bizarre paradoxes, that
in an adversary proceeding it was useless to hear the two parties; for, they say,
either the first has proved his assertion, or he has not proved it. If he has
proved it, there is nothing more to say, and his adversary ought to be condemned.
If he has not proved it, he is wrong, and his suit ought to be dismissed. I find
that the method of all those who accept an exclusive revelation closely resembles
that of these Stoics. A» soon as each claims to be the only right one, it is
necessary, in order to choose among so many parties, to listen to them all;
otherwise, one is being unjust.55
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not sensible people, people of good faith, decent people, friends of the truth who,
in order to profess it, would need only to know it? However, each sees the truth in
his own worship and finds absurd the worship of other nations. Therefore, either
these foreign forms of worship are not as extravagant as they seem to us, or the
reason we find in our own proves nothing.
We have three principal religions in Europe. One accepts a single revelation, the
second accepts two, the third accepts three. Each detests and curses the other two,
accusing them of being blind, hardhearted, opinionated, and dishonest. What
impartial man will dare to judge among them if he has not carefully weighed their
proofs, carefully listened to their arguments? The religion which accepts only one
revelation is the oldest and appears to be the most certain. The one which accepts
three is the most modern and appears to be the most consistent. The one which
accepts two and rejects the third may very well be the best, but it certainly has
all the prejudices against it. The inconsistency leaps to the eyes.
In the three revelations the sacred books are written in languages unknown to the
people who follow them. The Jews no longer understand Hebrew; the Christians
understand neither Hebrew nor Greek; neither the Turks nor the Persians understand
Arabic, and the modern Arabs themselves no longer speak the language of Mohammed.
Is this not a simple way of instructing men—always speaking to them in a language
they do not understand? These books are translated, it will be said. A fine answer!
Who will assure me that these books are faithfully translated, that it is even
possible that they be? And if God has gone so far as to speak to men, why must He
need an interpreter?
I shall never be able to conceive that what every man is obliged to know is
confined to books, and that someone who does not have access to these books, or to
those who understand them, is punished for an ignorance which is involuntary.
Always books! What a mania. Because Europe is full of books, Europeans regard them
as indispensable, without thinking that in three-quarters of the earth they have
never been seen. Were not all books written by men? Why, then, would man need them
to know his duties, and what means had he of knowing them before these books were
written? Either he will learn these duties by himself, or he is excused from
knowing them.
Our Catholics make a great to-do about the authority of the Church; but what do
they gain by that, if they need as great an apparatus of proofs to establish this
authority as other sects need for establishing their doctrine directly? The Church
decides that the Church has the right to decide. Is that not an authority based on
good proofs? Step outside of that, and you return to all our discussions.
Do you know many Christians who have taken the effort to examine with care what
Judaism alleges against them? If some individuals have seen something of this, it
is in the books of Christians. A good way of informing oneself about their
adversaries' arguments! But what is there to do? If someone dared to publish among
us books in which Judaism were openly favored, we would punish the author, the
publisher, the
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bookseller.* This is a convenient and sure policy for always being right. There is
a pleasure in refuting people who do not dare to speak.
Those among us who have access to conversation with Jews are not much farther
advanced. These unfortunates feel themselves to be at our mercy. The tyranny
practiced against them makes them fearful. They know how little troubled Christian
charity is by injustice and cruelty. What will they dare to say without laying
themselves open to our accusing them of blasphemy? Greed gives us zeal, and they
are too rich not to be wrong. The most learned, the most enlightened among them are
always the most circumspect. You will convert some miserable fellow, who is paid to
calumniate his sect. You will put words into the mouths of some vile old-clothes
dealers, who will yield in order to flatter you. You will triumph over their
ignorance or their cowardice, while their learned men will smile in silence at your
ineptitude. But do you believe that in places where they feel secure you would win
out over them so cheaply? At the Sorbonne it is as clear as day that the
predictions about the Messiah relate to Jesus Christ. Among the Amsterdam rabbis it
is just as clear that they do not have the least relation to Jesus. I shall never
believe that I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a
free state, schools, and universities, where they can speak and dispute without
risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say.
At Constantinople the Turks state their arguments, but we do not dare to state our
own. There it is our turn to crawl. If the Turks demand from us the same respect
for Mohammed that we demand for Jesus Christ from the Jews, who do not believe in
him any more than we believe in Mohammed, are the Turks wrong? Are we right?
According to what equitable principle shall we resolve this question?
Two-thirds of mankind are neither Jews nor Mohammedans nor Christians, and how many
million men have never heard of Moses, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed? This is denied;
it is maintained that our missionaries go everywhere. That is easily said. But do
they go into the still unknown heart of Africa, where no European has ever
penetrated up to now? Do they go to deepest Tartary, to follow on horseback the
wandering hordes who are never approached by a foreigner, and who, far from having
heard of the Pope, hardly even know of the Grand Lama? Do they go into the immense
continents of America, where whole nations still do not know that peoples from
another world have set foot in theirs? Do they go to Japan, from which their
maneuvers got them thrown out forever, and where their predecessors are known to
the generations now being born only as guileful intriguers who came with a
hypocritical zeal to take hold of the empire by stealth? Do they go into the harems
of the princes of Asia to proclaim the Gospel to thousands of poor slaves? What
have the women of this part of the
* Among countless known facts, here is one which needs no commentary. In the
sixteenth century the Catholic theologians had condemned to the fire all the books
of the Jews, without exception. The illustrious and learned Reuchlin, consulted
about this affair, brought upon himself terrible troubles which almost ruined him
merely by expressing the opinion that one could preserve those books which were not
anti-Christian and which dealt with matters neutral to religion."7
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world done to prevent any missionary from preaching the faith to them? Will they
all go to hell for having been recluses?
Even if it were true that the Gospel has been proclaimed everywhere on earth, what
would be gained by it? Surely on the eve of the day that the first missionary
arrived in some country, someone died there who was not able to hear him. Now tell
me what we are going to do with that person? If there were only a single man in the
whole universe who had never been preached to about Jesus Christ, the objection
would be as strong for that single man as for a quarter of mankind.
Even if the ministers of the Gospel have made themselves heard by distant peoples,
what have they told them which could reasonably be accepted on their word and which
did not demand the most exact verification? You proclaim to me a God born and dead
two thousand years ago at the other end of the world in some little town, and you
tell me that whoever has not believed in this mystery will be damned. These are
very strange things to believe so quickly on the sole authority of a man whom I do
not know! Why did your god make these events take place so far from me, if he
wanted me to be under an obligation to be informed of them? Is it a crime not to
know what takes place at the antipodes? Can I divine that there were a Hebrew
people and a city of Jerusalem in another hemisphere? I might as well be obliged to
know what is happening on the moon! You say that you come to teach this to me. But
why did you not come to teach it to my father, or why do you damn this good old man
for never having known anything about it? Ought he to be eternally punished for
your laziness, he who was so good and beneficent, and who sought only the truth? Be
of good faith; then put yourself in my place. See if I ought to believe on your
testimony alone all the unbelievable things you tell me and to reconcile so many
injustices with the just God whom you proclaim to me. I beg you, let me go and see
this distant country where so many marvels take place that are unheard of in this
one. Let me go and find out why the inhabitants of this Jerusalem treated God like
a thief. They did not, you say, recognize him as god? What shall I do then, I who
have never even heard Him mentioned except by you? You add that they were punished,
dispersed, oppressed, enslaved, that none of them comes near that city anymore.
Surely they well deserved all that. But what do today's inhabitants say of the
deicide committed by their predecessors? They deny it; they, too, do not recognize
God as God. The children of the others, then, might as well have been left there.
What! In the very city where God died, neither the old nor the new inhabitants
acknowledged him, and you want me to acknowledge him, me who was born two thousand
years after and two thousand leagues away? Do you not see that before I put faith
in this book which you call sacred, and of which I understand nothing, I must be
informed by people other than you when and by whom it was written, how it was
preserved, how it was transmitted to you, what arguments are given by those in your
country who reject it, although they know as well as you all that you teach me? You
are well aware that I must necessarily go to Europe, Asia, and Palestine and
examine everything for myself. I would have to be mad to listen to you prior to
that time.
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Not only does this discourse appear reasonable to me, but I maintain that every man
in his senses ought to speak thus in a similar case and dismiss without more ado
the missionary who is in a hurry to instruct and baptize him before verification of
the proofs. Now, I maintain that there is no revelation against which the same
objections do not have as much strength as, or more strength than, against
Christianity. From this it follows that if there is only one true religion and
every man is obliged to follow it under penalty of damnation, one's life must be
spent in studying them all, in going deeper into them, in comparing them, in
roaming around the country where each is established. No one is exempt from the
first duty of man; no one has a right to rely on the judgment of others. The
artisan who lives only by his work, the laborer who does not know how to read, the
delicate and timid maiden, the invalid who can hardly leave his bed—all without
exception must study, meditate, engage in disputation, travel, roam the world.
There will no longer be any stable and settled people; the whole earth will be
covered only with pilgrims going at great expense and with continuous hardships to
verify, to compare, and to examine for themselves the various forms of worship that
people observe. Then it will be goodbye to the trades, the arts, the humane
sciences, and all the civil occupations. There can no longer be any other study
than that of religion. He who has enjoyed the most robust health, best employed his
time, best used his reason, and lived the most years will hardly know what to think
in his old age; and it will be a great deal if he learns before his death in what
worship he ought to have lived.
Do you want to modify this method and give the least hold to the authority of men?
At that moment you surrender everything to it. And if the son of a Christian does
well in following his father's religion without a profound and impartial
examination, why would the son of a Turk do wrong in similarly following his
father's religion? I defy all the intolerant people in the world to answer this
question in a manner satisfactory to a sensible man.
Pressed by these arguments, some would prefer to make God unjust and to punish the
innocent for their father's sin rather than to renounce their barbarous dogma.
Others get out of it by obligingly sending an angel to instruct whoever, despite
living in invincible ignorance, has lived morally. What a fine invention that angel
is! Not content with subjecting us to their contrivances, they make it necessary
for God Himself to use them.
You see, my son, to what absurdity pride and intolerance lead, when each man is so
sure of his position and believes he is right to the exclusion of the rest of
mankind. All my researches have been sincere—I take as my witness that God of peace
Whom I adore and Whom I proclaim to you. But when I saw that these researches were
and always would be unsuccessful, and that I was being swallowed up in an ocean
without shores, I retraced my steps and restricted my faith to my primary notions.
I have never been able to believe that God commanded me, under penalty of going to
hell, to be so learned. I therefore closed all the books. There is one open to all
eyes; it is the book of nature. It is from this great and sublime book that I learn
to serve and
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worship its divine Author. No one can be excused for not reading it, because it
speaks to all men a language that is intelligible to all minds. Let us assume that
I was born on a desert island, that I have not seen any man other than myself, that
I have never learned what took place in olden times in some corner of the world;
nonetheless, if I exercise my reason, if I cultivate it, if I make good use of my
God-given faculties which require no intermediary, I would learn of myself to know
Him, to love Him, to love His works, to want the good that He wants, and to fulfill
all my duties on earth in order to please Him. What more will all the learning of
men teach me?
If I were a better reasoner or better educated, perhaps I would sense the truth of
revelation, its utility for those who are fortunate enough to acknowledge it. But
if I see in its favor proofs I cannot combat, I also see against it objections I
cannot resolve. There are so many solid reasons for and against that I do not know
what to decide, and I neither accept nor reject it. I reject only the obligation to
acknowledge it, because this alleged obligation is incompatible with God's justice
and because, far from removing the obstacles to salvation, it would have multiplied
them and made them insurmountable for the greater part of mankind. With this
exception I remain in respectful doubt about this point. I am not so presumptuous
as to believe myself infallible. Other men have been able to achieve certainty
about what seems uncertain to me. I reason for myself and not for them. I neither
blame them nor imitate them. Their judgment may be better than mine, but it is not
my fault that it is not mine.
I also admit that the majesty of the Scriptures amazes me, and that the holiness of
the Gospel speaks to my heart. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their
pomp. How petty they are next to this one! Can it be that a book at the same time
so sublime and so simple is the work of men? Can it be that he whose history it
presents is only a man himself? Is his the tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious
sectarian? What gentleness, what purity in his morals! What touching grace in his
teachings! What elevation in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his speeches! What
presence of mind, what finesse, and what exactness in his responses! What a
dominion over his passions! Where is the man, where is the sage who knows how to
act, to suffer, and to die without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato
depicts his imaginary just man,* covered with all the opprobrium of crime and
worthy of all the rewards of virtue, he depicts Jesus Christ feature for feature.
The resemblance is so striking that all the Fathers have sensed it; it is
impossible to be deceived about it. What prejudices, what blindness one must have
to dare to compare the son of Sophronis-cus to the son of Mary? What a distance
from one to the other! Socrates, dying without pain and without ignominy, easily
sticks to his character to the end; and if this easy death had not honored his
life, one would doubt whether Socrates, for all his intelligence, were anything but
a sophist. He invented morality, it is said. Others before him put it into
practice; all he did was to say what they had done; all he did
* De Rep, Dial. 2.S8
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was to draw the lesson from their examples. Aristides was just before Socrates said
what justice is. Leonidas died for his country before Socrates had made it a duty
to love the fatherland. Sparta was sober before Socrates had praised sobriety.
Before he had defined virtue, Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where did Jesus
find among his own people that elevated and pure morality of which he alone gave
the lessons and the example? * From the womb of the most furious fanaticism was
heard the highest wisdom, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues lent honor
to the vilest of all peoples. The death of Socrates, philosophizing tranquilly with
his friends, is the sweetest one could desire; that of Jesus, expiring in torment,
insulted, jeered at, cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible one could fear.
Socrates, taking the poisoned cup, blesses the man who gives it to him and who is
crying. Jesus, in the midst of a frightful torture, prays for his relentless
executioners. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the
life and death of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the story of the
Gospel was wantonly contrived? My friend, it is not thus that one contrives; the
facts about Socrates, which no one doubts, are less well attested than those about
Jesus Christ. At bottom, this is to push back the difficulty without doing away
with it. It would be more inconceivable that many men in agreement had fabricated
this book than that a single one provided its subject. Never would Jewish authors
have found either this tone or this morality; and the Gospel has characteristics of
truth that are so great, so striking, so perfectly inimitable that its contriver
would be more amazing than its hero. With all that, this same Gospel is full of
unbelievable things, of things repugnant to reason and impossible for any sensible
man to conceive or to accept! What is to be done amidst all these contradictions?
One ought always to be modest and cirumspect, my child—to respect in silence what
one can neither reject nor understand, and to humble oneself before the great Being
who alone knows the truth.
This is the involuntary skepticism in which I have remained. But this skepticism is
in no way painful for me, because it does not extend to the points essential to
practice and because I am quite decided on the principles of all my duties. I serve
God in the simplicity of my heart. I seek to know only what is important for my
conduct. As for the dogmas which have an influence neither on actions nor on
morality, and about which so many men torment themselves, I do not trouble myself
about them at all. I regard all the particular religions as so many salutary
institutions which prescribe in each country a uniform manner of honoring God by
public worship. These religions can all have their justifications in the climate,
the government, the genius of the people, or some other local cause which makes one
preferable to another according to the time and place. I believe them all to be
right as long as one serves God suitably. The essential worship is that of the
heart. God does not reject its homage, if it is sincere, in whatever form it is
offered to Him. I have been called—in the form of worship which I profess— to the
service of the Church, and I perform with all possible exactness
* See in the Sermon on the Mount the parallel he himself draws between the morality
of Moses and his own. Matth. C.5. 21 et seq.
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BOOK IV
the tasks prescribed to me. My conscience would reproach me for voluntarily failing
to do so on any point. You know that after a long interdict I obtained, through M.
de Mellarede's M influence, permission to resume my functions in order to help me
to live. Formerly I said the Mass with the lightness with which one eventually
treats the most serious things when one does them too often. But since adopting my
new principles, I celebrate it with more veneration. I am filled with the majesty
of the Supreme Being, with His presence, and with the insufficiency of the human
mind, which has so little conception of what relates to its Author. Bearing in mind
that I bring to Him the prayers of the people in a prescribed form, I carefully
follow all the rites, I recite attentively, I take care never to omit either the
least word or the least ceremony. When I approach the moment of the consecration, I
collect myself so as to perform it in the frame of mind that the Church and the
grandeur of the sacrament demand. I try to annihilate my reason before the supreme
intelligence. I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?" I pronounce
the sacramental words with respect, and I put into them all the faith within my
power. Whatever may be the case in regard to this inconceivable mystery, I have no
fear that I shall be punished on Judgment Day for having profaned it in my heart.
I have been honored with a sacred ministry, although in the lowest rank, and I
shall never do or say anything to make myself unworthy of fulfilling its sublime
duties. I shall always preach virtue to men; I shall always exhort them to do good;
and insofar as I am able, I shall set them a good example. I shall not fail to make
religion lovable to them; I shall not fail to strengthen their faith in the truly
useful dogmas every man is obliged to believe. But God forbid that I ever preach
the cruel dogma of intolerance to them, that I ever bring them to detest their
neighbor, to say to other men, "You will be damned." * Were I in a more noticeable
rank, this reservation could cause me trouble. But I am too unimportant to have
much to fear, and I can hardly fall lower than I now am. Whatever happens, I shall
never blaspheme divine justice and shall never lie about the Holy Spirit.
It has long been my ambition to have the honor of being a parish priest. I still
have this ambition, but I no longer hope for its fulfillment. My good friend, I
find nothing so fine as' being a parish priest. A good parish priest is a minister
of goodness, just as a good magistrate is a minister of justice. A parish priest
never has to do harm. If he cannot always accomplish the good by himself, he is
always in a fitting position to encourage it, and he often obtains it if he knows
how to make himself respected. O if I could ever serve some poor parish of good
people in our mountains, I would be happy, for it seems to me that I would be the
cause of my parishioners' happiness. I would not make them rich, but I would share
their poverty. I would remove from
* The duty to follow and love the religion of one's country does not extend to
dogmas contrary to good morals, such as that of intolerance. It is this horrible
dogma which arms men against one another and makes them all enemies of mankind. The
distinction between civil tolerance and theological tolerance is puerile and vain.
These two tolerances are inseparable, and one cannot be accepted without the other.
Even angels would not live in peace with men they regarded as enemies of God.
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them the stigma and the contempt they suffer, more unbearable than indigence. I
would make them love concord and equality, which often banish poverty and always
make it bearable. When they saw that I was in no way better off than they and
nevertheless lived in contentment, they would learn how to be consoled for their
fate and how to live in contentment like me. When instructing them, I would be less
attached to the spirit of the Church than to the spirit of the Gospel, in which the
dogma is simple and the morality sublime, and in which one sees few religious
practices and many works of charity. Before teaching them what must be done, I
would always make an effort to practice it, so that they would clearly see that I
believe all that I say to them. If I had Protestants in my neighborhood or in my
parish, I would not distinguish them at all from my true parishioners in everything
connected with Christian charity. I would bring them all to love one another
without distinction and to regard one another as brothers, to respect all
religions, and to live in peace, with each observing his own. I think that to urge
someone to leave the religion in which he was born is to urge him to do evil, and
consequently is to do evil oneself. While waiting for greater enlightenment, let us
protect public order. In every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb
the worship they prescribe; let us not lead the citizens to disobedience. For we do
not know with certainty whether it is a good thing for them to abandon their
opinions in exchange for others, and we are very certain that it is an evil thing
to disobey the laws.
My young friend, I have just recited to you with my own mouth my profession of
faith such as God reads it in my heart. You are the first to whom I have told it.
You are perhaps the only one to whom I shall ever tell it. So long as there remains
some sound belief among men, one must not disturb peaceful souls or alarm the faith
of simple people with difficulties which they cannot resolve and which upset them
without enlightening them. But once everything is shaken, one ought to preserve the
trunk at the expense of the branches. Consciences which are agitated, uncertain,
almost extinguished, and in the condition in which I have seen yours, need to be
reinforced and awakened; and in order to put them back on the foundation of eternal
truths, it is necessary to complete the job of ripping out the shaky pillars to
which they think they are still attached.
You are at the critical age when the mind opens to certitude, when the heart
receives its form and its character, and when one's whole life, whether for good or
for bad, is determined. Later the substance is hardened, and new impressions no
longer leave a mark. Young man, receive the stamp of truth on your still flexible
soul. If I were more sure of myself, I would have taken a dogmatic and decisive
tone with you. But I am a man; I am ignorant and subject to error. What could I do?
I have opened my heart to you without reserve. What I hold to be sure, I have told
to you as being sure. I have told you my doubts as doubts, my opinions as opinions.
I have told you my reasons for doubting and for believing. Now it is for you to
judge. You have taken your time. This caution is wise and makes me think well of
you. Begin by putting your conscience in a condition where it wishes to be enlight-
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BOOK IV
ened. Be sincere with yourself. Make your own those of my sentiments which have
persuaded you. Reject the rest. You are not yet depraved enough by vice to be in
danger of choosing badly. I would suggest our conferring about it, but as soon as
people engage in disputation, they get heated. Vanity and obstinacy get mixed up
with it; good faith is no longer present. My friend, never engage in disputation,
for one enlightens neither oneself nor others by it. As for me, it is only after
many years of meditation that I have made my decision. I am sticking to it; my
conscience is tranquil, my heart is contented. If I wanted to start over again with
a new examination of my sentiments, I would not bring to it a purer love of the
truth, and my mind, which has already become less active, would be less in a
condition to know it. I shall stay as I am, lest the taste for contemplation
gradually become an idle passion and make me lukewarm about the exercise of my
duties, and lest I fall back into my former Pyrrhonism, without recovering the
strength to get out of it. More than half of my life is past; I have left only the
time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my
virtues. If I am deceived, it is in spite of myself. He who reads in the depth of
my heart well knows that I do not like my blindness. In my powerlessness to escape
from it by my own lights, the only means that remains to me for getting out of it
is a good life; and if God can bring forth children for Abraham from the very
stones, every man has a right to hope for enlightenment when he makes himself
worthy of it.
If my reflections lead you to think as I do, if my sentiments are also yours and we
have the same profession of faith, here is the advice I give you. No longer expose
your life to the temptations of poverty and despair; no longer spend it loitering
ignominiously at the mercy of foreigners; and stop eating the vile bread of
charity. Go back to your own country, return to the religion of your fathers,
follow it in the sincerity of your heart, and never leave it again. It is very
simple and very holy. I believe that of all the religions on earth it is the one
which has the purest morality and which is most satisfactory to reason. As to the
expenses of the trip, don't worry; they will be provided for. And do not fear the
shame of a humiliating return. One ought to blush at making a mistake and not at
correcting it. You are still at an age when everything can be pardoned, but when
one no longer sins with impunity. If you wish to listen to your conscience,
countless vain obstacles will disappear at its voice. You will sense that in the
uncertainty in which we dwell, it is an inexcusable presumption to profess a
religion other than that in which we were born, and a falseness not to practice
sincerely the religion which we profess. For if we go astray, we deprive ourselves
of a great excuse at the tribunal of the Sovereign Judge. Will He not pardon the
error on which we were weaned sooner than the error we dared to choose ourselves?
My son, keep your soul in a condition where it always desires that there be a God,
and you shall never doubt it. What is more, whatever decision you may make, bear in
mind that the true duties of religion are independent of the institutions of men;
that a just heart is the true temple of the divinity; that in every country and in
every sect the sum
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of the law is to love God above everything and one's neighbor as oneself; that no
religion is exempt from the duties of morality; that nothing is truly essential
other than these duties; that inner worship is the first of these duties; and that
without faith no true virtue exists.
Flee those who sow dispiriting doctrines in men's hearts under the pretext of
explaining nature. Their apparent skepticism is a hundred times more assertive and
more dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries. Under the haughty pretext
that they alone are enlightened, true, and of good faith, they imperiously subject
us to their peremptory decisions and claim to give us as the true principles of
things the unintelligible systems they have built in their imaginations. Moreover,
by overturning, destroying, and trampling on all that men respect, they deprive the
afflicted of the last consolation of their misery, and the powerful and the rich of
the only brake on their passions. They tear out from the depths of our hearts
remorse for crime and hope of virtue, and yet boast that they are the benefactors
of mankind. They say that the truth is never harmful to men. I believe it as much
as they do, and in my opinion this is a great proof that what they teach is not the
truth.*
* The two parties attack each other reciprocally with so many sophisms that to want
to deal with them all would be an immense and rash undertaking. It is already a lot
to take note of some of them as they arise. One of the most familiar sophisms of
the philosophist party is to contrast a supposed people of good philosophers with a
people of bad Christians, as if a people of true philosophers were easier to make
than a people of true Christians! I do not know whether one is easier to find than
the other among individuals. But I do know that as soon as it is a question of
peoples, it is necessary to suppose one which will abuse philosophy without
religion, just as our peoples abuse religion without philosophy. And this seems to
me to be a very different question.
Bayle has proved very well that fanaticism is more pernicious than atheism, and
this is incontestable."" But what he did not take care to say, and which is no less
true, is that fanaticism, although sanguinary and cruel, is nevertheless a grand
and strong passion which elevates the heart of man, makes him despise death, and
gives him a prodigious energy that need only be better directed to produce the most
sublime virtues. On the other hand, irreligion—and the reasoning and philosophic
spirit in general—causes attachment to life, makes souls effeminate and degraded,
concentrates all the passions in the baseness of private interest, in the
abjectness of the human I, and thus quietly saps the true foundations of every
society. For what private interests have in common is so slight that it will never
outweigh what sets them in opposition.
If atheism does not cause the spilling of men's blood, it is less from love of
peace than from indifference to the good. Whatever may be going on is of little
importance for the allegedly wise man, provided that he can remain at rest in his
study. His principles do not cause men to be killed, but they prevent them from
being born by destroying the morals which cause them to multiply, by detaching them
from their species, by reducing all their affections to a secret egoism as deadly
to population as to virtue. Philosophic indifference resembles the tranquility of
the state under depotism. It is the tranquility of death. It is more destructive
than war itself.
Thus fanaticism, although more deadly in its immediate effects than what is today
called the philosophic spirit, is much less so in its consequences. Moreover, it is
easy to put fair maxims on display in books; but the question is whether these
maxims really are well connected with the doctrine, whether they flow from it
necessarily; and that is what has not appeared clear up to now. It still remains to
be known whether philosophy, if it were at its ease and on the throne, would have a
good command over vainglory, interest, ambition, and the petty passions of man, and
whether it would practice that gentle humanity it lauds to us in its writings.
From the point of view of principles, there is nothing that philosophy can do well
that religion does not do still better, and religion does many things that
philosophy could not do.
Practice is something else. But further examination is required. It is true that no
man follows his religion, when he has one, in every point. It is also true that
most
[3^]
BOOK IV
Good young man, be sincere and true without pride. Know how to be ignorant. You
will deceive neither yourself nor others. If ever you have cultivated your talents
and they put you in a position to speak to men, never speak to them except
according to your conscience, without worrying whether they will applaud you. The
abuse of learning produces incredulity. Every learned man disdains the common
sentiment; each wants to have his own. Proud philosophy leads to freethinking as
blind devoutness leads to fanaticism. Avoid these extremes. Always remain firm in
the path of truth (or what in the simplicity of your heart appears to you to be the
truth), without ever turning away from it out of vanity or weakness. Dare to
acknowledge God among the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant.
You will perhaps be the only member of your party, but you will have within
yourself a witness which will enable you to do without the witness of men. Whether
they love you or hate you, whether they read or despise your writings, it does not
matter: speak the truth; do the good. What does matter for man is to fulfill his
duties on earth, and it is in forgetting oneself that one works for oneself. My
child, private interest deceives us. It is only the hope of the just which never
deceives.83
I have transcribed this writing not as a rule for the sentiments that one ought to
follow in religious matters, but as an example of the way one can reason with one's
pupil in order not to diverge from the method I have tried to establish. So long as
one concedes nothing to the authority of men or to the prejudices of the country in
which one was born, the light of reason alone cannot, in the education founded by
nature, lead us any farther than natural religion. This is what I limit myself to
with
men hardly have one and do not follow at all the one they have. Still, some men do
have one and follow it at least in part; and it is indubitable that religious
motives often prevent them from doing harm and produce virtues and laudable actions
which would not have occurred without these motives.
If a monk denies having received something with which he was entrusted, what
follows, other than the fact that a fool confided it to him? If Pascal had denied
having received such a deposit, that would prove that Pascal was a hypocrite and
nothing more. But a monk! . . . Are the people who traffic in religion those who
are religious? All the crimes committed among the clergy, as elsewhere, do not
prove that religion is useless, but that very few people are religious.
Our modern governments incontestably owe their more solid authority and less
frequent revolutions to Christianity. It has made these governments less sanguinary
themselves. This is proved by actually comparing them to ancient governments. A
better understanding of religion, by dispelling fanaticism, has given more
gentleness to Christian morals. This change is not the work of literature, for
wherever the latter has flourished humanity has not been any more respected. This
is attested by the cruelties of the Athenians, the Roman emperors, and the Chinese.
How many works of mercy are the result of the Gospel! Among the Catholics, how many
restitutions, how many reparations are caused by the confession! Among us, how many
reconciliations and deeds of charity are fostered by the approach of Communion
time. How much less greedy usurers were made by the Jubilee of the Hebrews, and how
many miseries it prevented!"' The brotherhood promoted by this law united the whole
nation, and not a beggar was to be seen among them. Nor are any seen among the
Turks, who have innumerable pious institutions. They are hospitable from religious
principle, even toward the enemies of their worship.
The Mohammedans say [according to Chardin] that after the examination which will
follow the universal resurrection, all the bodies will pass over a bridge called
Poul-Serrho which crosses over the eternal fire. This bridge, they say, can be
called the third and last examination and the true final judgment,
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EMILE
my Emile. If he must have another religion, I no longer have the right to be his
guide in that. It is up to him alone to choose it.
We work in collaboration with nature, and while it forms the physical man, we try
to form the moral man. But we do not make the same progress. The body is already
robust and strong while the soul is still languorous and weak, and no matter what
human art does, temperament always precedes reason. Up to now we have given all our
care to restraining the former and arousing the latter, in order that man may as
much as possible always be one. In developing his nature, we have sidetracked its
nascent sensibility; we have regulated it by cultivating reason. The intellectual
objects moderated the impression of the objects of sense. In going back to the
principle of things we have protected him from the empire of the senses. It was
simple to rise from the study of nature to the quest for its Author.
When we have gotten there, what new holds we have given ourselves over our pupil.
How many new means we have for speaking to his heart! It is only then that he finds
his true interest in being good, in doing good far from the sight of men and
without being forced by the laws, in being just between God and himself, in
fulfilling his duty, even at the expense of his life, and in carrying virtue in his
heart. He does this not only for the love of order, to which each of us always
prefers love of self, but for the love of the Author of his being—a love which is
confounded with that same love of self—and, finally, for the enjoyment of that
durable happiness which the repose of a good conscience and the contemplation of
this Supreme Being promise him in the other life after he has spent this one well.
Abandon this, and I no longer see anything but injustice, hypocrisy, and lying
among men. Private interest, which in case of conflict necessarily prevails over
everything,
because it is there that the separation of the good from the wicked will be
made . . . etc.
The Persians [continues Chardin] are very much infatuated by this bridge, and when
someone suffers an insult for which he cannot in any way or at any time get
satisfaction, his final consolation is to say, "Very well, by the living God, you
will pay double for it on the final day. You shall not pass over Poul-Serrho
without having given me satisfaction beforehand. I shall hold on to the hem of your
jacket and throw myself at your legs." I have seen many eminent men, belonging to
all sorts of professions, who were apprehensive that someone would thus shout
"Haro" at them when they crossed this formidable bridge, and entreated those who
complained of them to pardon them. That happened to me a hundred times myself. Men
of quality who had badgered me into acting otherwise than I would have wanted,
approached me after they thought the irritation had passed and said to me, "I beg
you, halal becon antchisra," which means, "Make this affair lawful or just for me."
Some have even given me gifts and rendered services to me in order that I pardon
them and declare that I did so sincerely. The cause of this is nothing other than
the belief that one will not cross the bridge of hell without having rendered the
last penny to those one has oppressed, [vol. VII, p. 50] °a Should I believe that
the idea of this bridge, which corrects so many iniquities, never prevents any? If
one took this idea away from the Persians by persuading them that there is no Poul-
Serrho or any place like it where the oppressed wreak vengeance on their tyrants
after death, is it not clear that this would put the latter very much at their ease
and would deliver them from the care of placating these unfortunates? It is false,
therefore, that this doctrine would not be harmful. Therefore, this doctrine would
not be the truth. -~
Philosopher, your moral laws are very fine, but I beg you to show me their
sanction. Stop beating around the bush for a moment, and tell me plainly what you
put in the place of Poul-Serrho.
[3M]
BOOK IV
teaches everyone to adorn vice with the mask of virtue. Let all other men do what
is good for me at their expense; let everything be related to me alone; let all
mankind, if need be, die in suffering and poverty to spare me a moment of pain or
hunger. This is the inner language of every unbeliever who reasons. Yes, I shall
maintain it all my life. Whoever speaks otherwise although he has said in his
heart, "There is no God," is nothing but a liar or a fool.
Reader, I am well aware that no matter what I do, you and I will never see my Emile
with the same features. You will always picture him as similar to your young
people, always thoughtless, petulant, nighty, wandering from party to party, from
entertainment to entertainment, never able to concentrate on anything. You will
laugh when you see me make a contemplative, a philosopher, a veritable theologian
out of an ardent, lively, intense, and impulsive young man at the most ebullient
age of life. You will say, "This dreamer always pursues his chimera. In giving us a
pupil of his making, he not only forms him, he creates him, he pulls him out of his
brain; and ithough he believes he is always following nature, he diverges from it
at every instant." I, comparing my pupil to yours, hardly find anything that they
can have in common. Since they are reared so differently, it would almost be a
miracle if Emile resembled yours in anything. Just as he spent his childhood in all
the freedom they take as young men, he begins as a young man to take the discipline
to which they were subjected as children. This discipline becomes a plague to them.
They loathe it; they see in it only the long tyranny of their masters; they believe
they leave childhood only in shaking off every kind of yoke; * they compensate
themselves then for the long constraint in which they were kept, just as a prisoner
freed from chains stretches, shakes, and flexes his limbs.
Emile, on the contrary, considers it an honor to make himself a man and to subject
himself to the yoke of nascent reason. His body, already formed, no longer needs
the same movements and by itself begins to quiet down, while his mind, half
developed, seeks its turn to take flight. Thus, for the others the age of reason is
only the age of license; for Emile it becomes the age of reasoning.
Do you want to know whether they or he is thereby closer to the order of nature?
Consider the differences in those who are more or less distant from it. Observe
young people in the country, and see if they are as petulant as are your young
people. "During the childhood of savages," says Le Beau, "they are always active
and involved in various games which stir the body; but almost as soon as they reach
the age of adolescence, they become tranquil and dreamy, and they no longer engage
in any games other than serious ones or games of chance." t Emile, who has been
raised with all the freedom of young peasants and young savages, should change and
quiet down as they do in growing up. The
* There is no one who sees childhood with so much contempt as those who are leaving
it, just as there is no country where the distinction of ranks is preserved with
more affectation than in those where inequality is not great and where everyone
always fears being confounded with his inferior.
t Le Beau, Aventures du Sieur Le Bean, avocat en Parlement. Vol. II, p. 70.
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EMILE
whole difference is that instead of acting solely to play or to feed himself, he
has learned to think in his labors and games. As he has reached this point by this
road, he is all ready for the road on which I am now setting him. The subjects of
reflection which I present to him inflame his curiosity because they are in
themselves fair, because they are entirely new for him, and because he is in a
condition to understand them. On the other hand, how could your young people, who
are bored and exasperated by your insipid lessons, your long-winded moralizing, and
your eternal catechisms, fail to refuse to apply their minds to what has been made
a gloomy business for them—the heavy precepts with which they have constantly been
burdened, and the meditations on the Author of their being, Who has been made the
enemy of their pleasures? They have conceived only aversion, disgust, and distaste
for all that; constraint has repelled them. What means is left to make them devoted
to such things when they begin to decide for themselves? They have to have novelty
to be pleased; they no longer can stand anything children are told. The same is the
case with my pupil. When he becomes a man, I speak to him as to a man and tell him
only new things. It is precisely because they bore the others that he ought to find
them to his taste.
Consider how I gain time for him doubly by delaying the progress of nature to the
advantage of reason. But have I actually delayed this progress? No, I have only
prevented imagination from accelerating it. I have counterbalanced the premature
lessons the young man receives elsewhere with lessons of another kind. While the
torrent of our institutions carries him away, I attract him in the opposite
direction by other institutions. This is not to remove him from his place but to
keep him in it.
The true moment of nature comes at last. It must come. Since man must die, he must
reproduce in order that the species may endure and the order of the world be
preserved. When, by the signs of which I have spoken, you have a presentiment of
the critical moment, instantly abandon your old tone with him forever. He is still
your disciple, but he is no longer your pupil. He is your friend, he is a man. From
now on treat him as such.
What! Must I abdicate my authority when it is most necessary to me? Must the adult
be left to himself at the moment when he least knows how to conduct himself, and
when he makes the greatest slips? Must I renounce my rights when it is most
important for him that I make use of them? Your rights! Who is telling you to
renounce them? It is only at present that they begin for him. Up to now you got
nothing from him except by force or ruse. Authority and the law of duty were
unknown to him. He had to be constrained or deceived to make him obey you. But see
how many new chains you have put around his heart. Reason, friendship, gratitude,
countless affections speak to him in a tone he cannot fail to recognize. Vice has
not yet made him deaf to their voice. He is still sensitive only to the passions of
nature. The first of all, which is self-love, puts him in your hands. Habit also
puts him in your hands. If the transport of a moment tears him away from you,
regret immediately brings him back. The sentiment attaching him to
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you is the only permanent one; all the others pass and blot one another out. Do not
let him be corrupted; he will always be docile. He will not begin to be rebellious
until he is already depraved.
I readily admit that if you were to clash head on with his nascent desires and
foolishly were to treat as crimes the new needs he is feeling, you would not be
listened to for long. But as soon as you abandon my method, I no longer guarantee
you anything. Always remember that you are the minister of nature, and you will
never be its enemy.
But what course should be taken? Here the only choice is between encouraging his
inclinations and fighting them, between being his tyrant and being his accomplice;
and both alternatives have such dangerous consequences that hesitation about the
decision is only too justified.
The first means that presents itself for resolving this difficulty is to marry him
off very quickly. This is incontestably the surest and the most natural expedient.
I doubt, however, that it is the best or the most useful. I shall tell my reasons
later. In the meantime I agree that young people must be married when they reach
the age at which they are nubile. But that age comes before its proper time for
them; it is we who have induced its early arrival. It ought to be put off until
maturity.
If one had only to listen to the inclinations and follow where they lead, the job
would soon be done. But there are so many contradictions between the rights of
nature and our social laws that one must constantly twist and turn in order to
reconcile them. One must use a great deal of art to prevent social man from being
totally artificial.
For the reasons previously presented I believe that by the means I have related and
other similar ones the ignorance of the desires and the purity of the senses can be
extended at least until the age of twenty. This is so true that among the Germans a
young man who lost his virginity before that age suffered a permanent loss of
reputation. With good reason, writers have attributed the vigorous constitutions of
the Germans and the multitude of their children to the continence practiced by
these peoples during their youth.
One can even greatly prolong this period of continence; only a few generations ago
nothing was more common in France itself. Among other known examples, Montaigne's
father, a man who was scrupulous and true as well as strong and well formed, swore
that he was married a virgin at the age of thirty-three after long service in the
wars of Italy; and one can see in the son's writings what vigor and what gaiety the
father preserved when he was over sixty."4 Certainly the contrary opinion is a
result more of our morals and our prejudices than of knowledge of the species in
general.
Therefore I can leave aside the example of our young. They prove nothing about
those who were not raised like them. Given that nature has in this respect no fixed
point that cannot be moved ahead or back, I believe that, without departing from
nature's law, I can assume that through my efforts Emile has remained in his first
innocence up to now. I see this happy period about to end. Surrounded by ever
growing perils, he is going to get away from me no matter what I do. At the first
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EMILE
occasion—and this occasion will not be slow in arising—he is going to follow the
blind instinct of the senses. The odds are a thousand to one that he is going to be
ruined. I have reflected on men's morals too much not to see the invincible
influence of this first moment on the rest of his life. If I dissimulate and
pretend to see nothing, he takes advantage of my weakness. Believing he deceives
me, he despises me, and I am the accomplice of his ruin. If I try to straighten him
out, it is too late; he does not listen to me any more. I become inconvenient,
odious, and unbearable to him. He will not delay in getting rid of me. Therefore I
have only one reasonable course to take—to make him accountable to himself for his
actions, to protect him at least from the surprises of error, and to show him
openly the perils by which he is surrounded. Up to now I stopped him by his
ignorance; now he has to be stopped by his enlightenment.
This new instruction is important, and it is advisable to go back and pick up the
thread from a more general point of view. This is the moment to present my accounts
to him, so to speak; to show him how his time and mine have been employed; to
disclose to him what he is and what I am, what I have done, what he has done, what
we owe each other, all his moral relations, all the commitments he has contracted,
all those that have been contracted with him, what point he has reached in the
progress of his faculties, how much of the road he still has to cover, the
difficulties he will find there, the means of getting over these difficulties, what
I can still help him with, what he alone must now help himself with, and finally,
the critical point at which he stands, the new perils which surround him, and all
the solid reasons which ought to oblige him to keep an attentive watch over himself
before listening to his nascent desires.
Remember that to guide an adult it is necessary to take another tack than the one
taken to guide a child. Do not hesitate to instruct him in these dangerous
mysteries which you have so long hidden from him with so much care. Since he must
finally know about them, it is important that he learn them neither from another
nor from himself but from you alone. Since he is now forced to fight, he must know
his enemy, so that he will not be taken by surprise.
Young people who are found to be knowledgeable about these matters and who are
unaware how they came to this knowledge have never come to it with impunity. This
indiscreet instruction, which can have no decent purpose, at the very least soils
the imagination of those who receive it and disposes them to the vices of those who
give it. This is not all. Domestics insinuate themselves in this way into a child's
mind, gain his confidence, and make him regard his governor as a gloomy, boring
fellow; one of the favorite subjects of their secret colloquies with the child is
slandering his governor. When the child has reached this point, the master can
withdraw; he can do no more good.
But why does the child choose special confidants? Always due to the tyranny of
those who govern him. Why would he keep secrets from them, if he were not forced to
do so? Why would he complain of them, if he had no subject of complaint? They are
naturally his first con-
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BOOK IV
fidants. From the eagerness with which he comes to tell them what he thinks, it is
clear that he believes he has only half thought it until he has told them. You can
be sure that if the child fears neither a sermon nor a reprimand on your part, he
will always tell you everything; you can also be sure that no one will dare to
confide anything to him which he ought to keep secret from you when it is quite
certain that there is nothing he will keep secret from you.
What gives me most confidence in my method is that, in following its effects as
exactly as I can, I see no situation in the life of my pupil which does not leave
me some agreeable image of him. At the very moment when he is carried away by the
furies of temperament and, revolting against the hand which restrains him, he
struggles and begins to escape me, I still find in his agitation, in his anger, his
first simplicity. His heart, as pure as his body, is no more familiar with disguise
than with vice. Neither reproaches nor contempt have made him a coward; never has
vile fear taught him to disguise himself. He has all the indiscretion of innocence.
He is uncalculatingly naive. He does not yet know what use there is in deceit. Not
a single movement takes place in his soul which his mouth or his eyes do not
reveal, and often the sentiments he experiences are known to me sooner than to him.
As long as he continues freely to open his soul to me and to tell me with pleasure
what he feels, I have nothing to fear. But if he becomes more timid and reserved,
if I perceive in his conversation the first embarrassment of shame, instinct is
already developing. There is no longer a moment to lose, and if I do not hurry to
instruct him, he will soon be instructed in spite of me.
More than one reader, even among those who adopt my ideas, will think that what is
needed here is only a conversation held at random, and the job will be done. Oh,
that is not the way the human heart is governed! What one says means nothing if one
has not prepared the moment for saying it. Before sowing, the earth must be plowed;
the seed of virtue sprouts with difficulty, long preparation is required to make it
take root. One of the things that makes preaching most useless is that it is done
indiscriminately to everyone without distinction or selectivity. How can one think
that the same sermon is suitable to so many auditors of such diverse dispositions,
so different in mind, humor, age, sex, station, and opinion? There are perhaps not
even two auditors for whom what one says to all can be suitable; and all our
affections are so inconstant that there are perhaps not even two moments in the
life of each man when the same speech would make the same impression on him. Judge
whether the time for listening to grave lessons of wisdom is when the inflamed
senses derange the understanding and tyrannize the will. Therefore, never talk
reason to young people, even when they are at the age of reason, without first
putting them in a condition to understand it. Most wasted speeches are wasted due
to the fault of masters rather than of disciples. The pedant and the teacher say
pretty much the same things, but the former says them on every occasion, while the
latter says them only when he is sure of their effect.
As a somnambulist, wandering during his slumber, sleepwalks on the
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EMILE
brink of a precipice into which he would fall if he were suddenly awakened, so my
Emile, in the slumber of ignorance, escapes perils that he does not perceive. If I
awaken him with a start, he is lost. Let us first try to get him away from the
precipice; and then we shall awaken him in order to show it to him from farther
off.
Reading, solitude, idleness, the soft and sedentary life, and the society of women
and young people are dangerous trails to blaze at his age, and they keep him
constantly close to the peril. It is by means of other objects of sense that I put
his senses off the track; it is by setting another course for his energies that I
turn them away from the one they were beginning to take. It is by exercising his
body with hard labor that I restrain the activity of imagination that is carrying
him away. When the arms work hard, the imagination rests. When the body is tired
out, the heart does not become inflamed. The promptest and easiest precaution is to
tear him away from the locality of danger. First I take him out of the cities, far
from objects capable of tempting him. But this is not enough. In what desert, in
what wild abode will he escape the images pursuing him? Removing dangerous objects
is nothing, if I do not also remove the memory of them, if I do not find the art of
detaching him from everything, if I do not distract him from himself. Otherwise I
might as well have left him where he was.
Emile knows a trade, but this trade is not our expedient here. He likes and
understands agriculture, but agriculture does not suffice for us. The occupations
he knows become a routine; when he devotes himself to them, it is as though he were
doing nothing. He thinks about entirely different things; the head and the arms act
separately. He must have a new occupation which interests him by its novelty, which
keeps him on his toes, which pleases him, which requires application, which makes
him exert himself, an occupation for which he has a passion and to which he gives
himself completely. Now the only one which appears to me to unite all these
qualities is hunting. If hunting is ever an innocent pleasure, if it is ever
suitable to man, it is at present that one must have recourse to it. Emile has
everything needed to succeed at it. He is robust, adroit, patient, indefatigable.
He will infallibly get a taste for this exercise. He will give it all the ardor of
his age. He will lose in it—at least for a time—the dangerous inclinations born of
softness. The hunt hardens the heart as well as the body. It accustoms one to
blood, to cruelty. Diana has been presented as the enemy of love, and the allegory
is quite accurate. The languors of love are born only in sweet repose; violent
exercise stifles the tender sentiments. In the woods, in rural places, the lover
and the hunter are so differently affected that from the same objects they take
away entirely different images. The cool shady spots, the groves, the sweet refuges
of the former are for the latter only the grazing places of deer, the thickets in
which game withdraw, their hiding places when pursued. Where the lover hears only
nightingales and warbling, the hunter fancies horns and the yapping of dogs; the
lover imagines only dryads and nymphs, the hunter only whippers-in. packs of hounds
and horses. Take a walk in the country with these two kinds of men; from the
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difference in their language you will soon recognize that the earth does not have a
similar aspect for them, and the turn of their ideas is as different as the choice
of their pleasures.
I understand how these tastes are joined, and how one finally finds time for
everything. But the passions of youth are not to be divided in this way. Give it a
single occupation which it loves, and all the rest will soon be forgotten. The
variety of desires comes from the variety of kinds of knowledge, and the first
pleasures a person knows are long the only ones he seeks. I do not want Emile's
whole youth to be spent in killing animals, and I do not even pretend to justify in
every respect this ferocious passion. It is enough for me that it serves to suspend
a more dangerous passion, so that he will listen coolly to me when I speak of it
and I will have the time to depict it without exciting it.
There are periods in human life which are made never to be forgotten. The period of
the instruction about which I am speaking is such a time for Emile. It ought to
influence the rest of his days. Let us try therefore to engrave it in his memory in
such a way that it will never be effaced. One of the errors of our age is to use
reason in too unadorned a form, as if men were all mind. In neglecting the language
of signs that speak to the imagination, the most energetic of languages has been
lost. The impression of the word is always weak, and one speaks to the heart far
better through the eyes than through the ears. In wanting to turn everything over
to reasoning, we have reduced our precepts to words; we have made no use of
actions. Reason alone is not active. It sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and
it has never done anything great. Always to reason is the mania of small minds.
Strong souls have quite another language. It is with this language that one
persuades and makes others act.
I observe that in the modern age men no longer have a hold on one another except by
force or by self-interest; the ancients, by contrast, acted much more by persuasion
and by the affections of the soul because they did not neglect the language of
signs. All their covenants took place with solemnity in order to make them more
inviolable. Before force was established, the gods were the magistrates of mankind.
It was in their presence that individuals made their treaties and alliances and
uttered their promises. The face of the earth was the book in which their archives
were preserved. Stones, trees, heaps of rocks consecrated by these acts and thus
made respectable to barbaric men, were the pages of this book, which was constantly
open to all eyes. The well of the oath, the well of the living and seeing, the old
oak of Mamre, the mound of the witness,""' these were the crude but august
monuments of the sanctity of contracts. None would have dared to attack these
monuments with a sacrilegious hand, and the faith of men was more assured by the
guarantee of these mute witnesses than it is today by all the vain rigor of the
laws.
In regard to government, the august display of royal power impressed the subjects.
Marks of dignity—a throne, a scepter, a purple robe, a crown, a diadem—were sacred
things for them. These respected signs made the man who was thus adorned venerable
to them. Without
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EMILE
soldiers, without threats, he was obeyed as soon as he spoke. Now that we make an
affectation of abolishing these signs,* what happens as a result of this contempt?
Royal majesty is effaced from all hearts, kings no longer make themselves obeyed
except by dint of troops; the respect of subjects comes only from the fear of
punishment. Kings no longer have the burden of wearing their diadem, and the
nobility no longer have the insignia of their rank; but a hundred thousand arms
must always be ready in order to get their orders executed. Although this perhaps
seems finer to them, it is easy to see that in the long run this exchange will not
turn out to have been profitable for them.
What the ancients accomplished with eloquence was prodigious. But that eloquence
did not consist solely in fine, well-ordered speeches, and never did it have more
effect than when the orator spoke least. What was said most vividly was expressed
not by words but by signs. One did not say it, one showed it. The object that is
exhibited to the eyes shakes the imagination, arouses curiosity, keeps the mind
attentive to what is going to be said. Often this object alone has said everything.
Thrasybulus and Tarquin cutting off the tops of the poppies,07 Alexander placing
his seal on his favorite's mouth,'18 Diogenes walking before Zeno BB—did they not
speak better than if they had made long speeches? What series of words would have
rendered the same ideas so well? Darius, after he has entered Scythia with his
army, receives from the king of the Scythians a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five
arrows.70 The ambassador leaves his present and departs without saying anything. In
our days this man would have been regarded as crazy. This terrifying harangue made
its point, and Darius hurried to get back to his country in whatever way he could.
Substitute a letter for these signs. The more threatening it is, the less it will
frighten. It will only be bluster at which Darius would only have laughed.
How great was the attention that the Romans paid to the language of signs!
Different clothing according to ages and according to stations —togas, sagums,
praetexts, bullas, laticlaves; 71 thrones, lictors, fasces, axes; crowns of gold or
of herbs or of leaves; ovations, triumphs. Everything with them was display, show,
ceremony, and everything made an impression on the hearts of the citizens. It was
important to the state that the people assemble in this place rather than in that
other one, that they saw or did not see the Capitol, that they were or were not
turned in the direction of the Senate, that they deliberated on this or that day.
Accused persons changed costume, and so did candidates; warriors did not vaunt
their exploits, they showed their wounds. On the death of Caesar I imagine one of
our orators wishing to move the people; he exhausts all the commonplaces of his art
to present a pathetic description of Caesar's wounds, his blood, his corpse.
* The Roman clergy has very cleverly preserved them, and, following its example. so
have some republics, among them that of Venice. Thus the Venetian government, in
spite of the collapse of the state, still enjoys all the affection and adoration of
the people thanks to the pomp of its antique majesty. Apart from the Pope adorned
with his tiara, there can be neither king nor potentate nor man in the world so
respected as the Doge of Venice—without power, without authority, but rendered
sacred by his pomp and dressed up in a woman's hairdo under his ducal bonnet. The
ceremony of the bucentaur, which makes so many fools laugh, would cause the
population of Venice to shed all its blood for the maintenance of its tyrannical
government.""
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Antony, although eloquent, does not say all that. He has the body brought in.72
What rhetoric!
But this digression, like many others, gradually carries me far from my subject,
and my wanderings are too frequent to admit of being both long and tolerable. I
therefore return to my subject.
Never reason in a dry manner with youth. Clothe reason in a body if you want to
make youth able to grasp it. Make the language of the mind pass through the heart,
so that it may make itself understood. I repeat, cold arguments can determine our
opinions, but not our actions. They make us believe and not act. They demonstrate
what must be thought, not what must be done. If that is true for all men, it is a
fortiori true for young people, who are still enveloped in their senses and think
only insofar as they imagine.
Therefore, even after the preparations of which I have spoken, I shall be very
careful not to go all of a sudden to Emile's room and pompously make a long speech
to him about the subject in which I want to instruct him. I shall begin by moving
his imagination. I shall choose the time, the place, and the objects most favorable
to the impression I want to make. I shall, so to speak, call all of nature as a
witness to our conversations. I shall bring the Eternal Being, who is the Author of
nature, to testify to the truth of my speech; I shall take Him as judge between
Emile and me. I shall mark the place where we are—the rocks, the woods, and the
mountains surrounding us shall be monuments of his promises and mine. I shall put
in my eyes, my accent, and my gestures the enthusiasm and the ardor that I want to
inspire in him. Then I shall speak to him, and he will listen to me. I shall be
tender, and he will be moved. By concentrating upon the sanctity of my duties, I
shall make his duties more respectable to him. I shall heighten the force of my
reasoning with images and figurative language. My speeches will not be long and
diffuse and filled with cold maxims but will be abundant with overflowing
sentiments. My reasoning will be grave and sententious, but my heart will never
have said enough. Then, in revealing to him all I have done for him, I shall reveal
that I have done it for myself, and he will see in my tender affection the reason
for all my care. What surprise, what agitation I am going to cause in him by
suddenly changing language! Instead of narrowing his soul by always speaking of his
interest, I shall now speak of mine alone, and I shall thereby touch him more. I
shall inflame his young heart with all the sentiments of friendship, generosity,
and gratitude which I have already aroused and which are so sweet to cultivate. I
shall press him to my breast and shed tears of tenderness on him. I shall say to
him, "You are my property, my child, my work. It is from your happiness that I
expect my own. If you frustrate my hopes, you are robbing me of twenty years of my
life, and you are causing the unhappiness of my old age." It is in this way that
you get a young man to listen to you and that you engrave the memory of what you
say to him in the depths of his heart.
Up to now I have tried to give examples of the way a governor ought to instruct his
disciple in difficult situations. I have tried to do the same in this situation.
But after many attempts I give up, convinced that the
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EMILE
French language is too precious to express in a book the naivete of the first
lessons on certain subjects.
The French language is said to be the chastest of languages. For my part, I believe
it to be the most obscene. For it seems to me that the chasteness of a language
consists not in the careful avoidance of indecent meanings but in not having them.
In fact, to avoid them, one must think of them, and there is no language in which
it is more difficult to speak purely, in every sense, than in French. The reader,
always more clever at finding obscene meanings than the author is at keeping them
out, is scandalized and shocked by everything. How could what passes through impure
ears not be stained by them? A people with good morals, on the other hand, has
appropriate terms for all things, and these terms are always decent because they
are always used decently. It is impossible to imagine a language more modest than
that of the Bible, precisely because there everything is said with naivete. To
render the same things immodest, it suffices to translate them into French. What I
am going to say to my Emile will contain nothing that is not decent and chaste to
his ear, but to find it such in reading it, one must have a heart as pure as his.
I even think that reflections on the true purity of speech and on the false
delicacy of vice could have a useful place in the discussions about morality to
which this subject leads us; for in learning the language of decency, Emile must
also learn that of seemliness,™ and it is quite necessary that he learn why these
two languages are so different. However that may be, I maintain that if one waits,
instead of hammering vain precepts into the ears of the young before the proper
time—precepts which they then mock at the age when.they would be opportune; if one
prepares the moment for making oneself understood; if one then expounds the laws of
nature in all their truth; if one shows him the sanction of these same laws in the
physical and moral ills that their infraction brings down upon the guilty; if in
speaking of this inconceivable mystery of generation, one joins to the idea of the
allure given to this act by the Author of nature the idea of the exclusive
attachment which makes it delicious, and the idea of the duties of fidelity and of
modesty which surround it and redouble its charm in fulfilling its object; if, in
depicting marriage to him not only as the sweetest of associations but as the most
inviolable and holiest of all contracts, one tells him forcefully all the reasons
which make so sacred a bond respectable to all men, and which bring hatred and
maledictions to whoever dares to stain its purity; if one presents him with a
striking and true picture of the horrors of debauchery, of its foolish degradation,
of the gradual decline by which a first disorder leads to them all and finally
drags to destruction whoever succumbs to it; if, I say, one shows him clearly how
the taste for chastity is connected with health, strength, courage, the virtues,
love itself, and all the true goods of man, I maintain that one will then render
this chastity desirable and dear to him and that his mind will be amenable to the
means he will be given for preserving it; for, so long as chastity is preserved, it
is respected; it is despised only after having been lost.
It is not true that the inclination to evil is untamable, and that one
[3M]
BOOK IV
is not able to conquer it before having gotten the habit of succumbing to it.
Aurelius Victor says that many men in the transports of love voluntarily bought a
night with Cleopatra with their lives; and this sacrifice is not impossible for the
drunkenness of passion.74 But let us suppose that the most desperate man—the one
least in command of his senses—sees the apparatus of torture and is sure of
perishing on it in torments a quarter of an hour later. Not only would this man
instantaneously become superior to temptations; it would even cost him little to
resist them. The frightful image by which they would be accompanied would soon
distract him from them; and, always rebuffed, these temptations would tire of
returning. It is only our lukewarm will which causes all of our weakness, and we
are always strong enough to do what we strongly wish. Volenti nihil difficile.'7* O
if we detested vice as much as we love life, we would abstain from a pleasurable
crime as easily as from a mortal poison in a delicious dish!
How do we fail to see that if all the lessons given to a young man on this point
are without success, it is because they are without reasons suitable to his age,
and because it is important at every age to clothe reason in forms which will make
it loved. Speak to him gravely when necessary, but let what you say always have an
attraction that forces him to listen to you. Do not combat his desires with
dryness. Do not stifle his imagination; guide it lest it engender monsters. Speak
to him of love, of women, of pleasures. Make him find a charm in your conversations
which delights his young heart. Spare nothing to become his confidant. It is only
by this title that you will truly be his master. Then no longer fear that your
discussions will bore him; he will make you talk more than you want to.
If I have been able, in accordance with these maxims, to take all the necessary
precautions and to make speeches to my Emile suitable for the juncture of life that
he has reached, I do not doubt for an instant that he will come by himself to the
point where I want to lead him, that he will eagerly put himself in my safekeeping,
that he will be struck by the dangers with which he sees himself surrounded, and
will say to me with all the warmth of his age, "O my friend, my protector, my
master! Take back the authority you want to give up at the very moment that it is
most important for me that you retain it. You had this authority up to this time
only due to my weakness; now you shall have it due to my will, and it shall be all
the more sacred to me. Defend me from all the enemies who besiege me, and
especially from those whom I carry within myself and who betray me. Watch over your
work in order that it remain worthy of you. I want to obey your laws; I want to do
so always. This is my steadfast will. If ever I disobey you, it will be in spite of
myself. Make me free by protecting me against those of my passions which do
violence to me. Prevent me from being their slave; force me to be my own master and
to obey not my senses but my reason."
When you have brought your pupil to this point (and if he does not get there, it
will be your fault), be careful not to take him too quickly at his word lest, if
ever your dominion appear too hard for him, he will believe he has a right to
escape it by accusing you of having taken
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EMILE
him by surprise. It is at this moment that reserve and gravity have their place,
and this tone will impress him so much the more because it will be the first time
he will have seen you take it.
Therefore, you will say to him, "Young man, you make difficult commitments lightly.
You would have to know what they mean in order to have the right to undertake them.
You do not know the fury with which the senses, by the lure of pleasure, drag young
men like you into the abyss of the vices. I know that you do not have an abject
soul. You will never break faith, but how often you will repent having given it!
How often you will curse the one who loves you when he finds himself forced to rend
your heart in order to save you from the evils which threaten you! Just as Ulysses,
moved by the Sirens' song and seduced by the lure of the pleasures, cried out to
his crew to unchain him,70 so you will want to break the bonds which hinder you.
You will importune me with your complaints; you will reproach me for being a tyrant
when I am most tenderly concerned with you. In thinking only of making you happy, I
shall bring your hate down upon me. O my Emile, I can never bear the pain of being
odious to you. Even your happiness is too dear at this price. Good young man, do
you not see that in obliging yourself to obey me, you oblige me to guide you, to
forget myself in order to devote myself to you, to listen neither to your
complaints nor to your grumbling, to combat incessantly your desires and mine? You
are imposing a harsher yoke on me than on yourself. Before burdening both of us
with it, let us consult our strength. Take your time and give me mine for thinking
about it; remember that he who is slowest to make a promise is always most faithful
at keeping it."
You also should remember, masters, that the harder you make it to get your assent
to the commitment, the easier you make its fulfillment. It is important that the
young man be aware that he is promising much, and that you are promising yet more.
When the moment has come, and he has, so to speak, signed the contract, then change
your language. Make your dominion as gentle as you had indicated it would be
severe. You will say to him, "My young friend, you lack experience, but I have
fixed things so that you would not lack reason. You are in a position to see the
motives of my conduct in all things. To do so, you have only to wait until you are
calm. Always begin by obeying, and then ask me for an account of my orders. I shall
be ready to give you a reason for them as soon as you are in a position to
understand me, and I shall never be afraid of taking you as the judge between you
and me. You promise to be docile, and I promise to make use of this docility only
to make you the happiest of men. I give as a guarantee of my promise the fate that
you have enjoyed up to now. Find anyone else of your age who has passed a life as
sweet as yours, and I shall no longer promise you anything."
After establishing my authority, my first care will be to avoid the necessity of
using it. I shall spare nothing to establish myself more and more in his
confidence, to make myself more and more the confidant of his heart and the arbiter
of his pleasures. Far from combating the inclinations of his age, I shall consult
them in order to be their master. I shall join in his plans in order to direct
them; I shall not seek
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a distant happiness for him at the expense of the present. I want him to be happy
not once but always, if it is possible.
Those who want to guide the young soberly, in order to preserve them from the traps
of the senses, make love disgusting to them and would gladly make it a crime for
them to think of it at their age, as though love were made for the old. All these
deceitful lessons, to which the heart gives the lie, are not persuasive. The young
man, guided by a surer instinct, secretly laughs at the gloomy maxims to which he
feigns acquiescence, and all he waits for is the occasion to discard them. All this
is contrary to nature. By following an opposite route, I shall more surely arrive
at the same goal. I shall not be afraid to indulge him in the sweet sentiment for
which he has such a thirst. I shall depict it to him as the supreme happiness of
life, because in fact it is. In depicting it to him, I want him to yield to it. In
making him sense how much charm the union of hearts adds to the attraction of the
senses, I shall disgust him with libertinism, and I shall make him moderate by
making him fall in love.
How limited one must be to see only an obstacle to the lessons of reason in the
nascent desires of a young man! I see in them the true means of making him amenable
to these very lessons. One has a hold on the passions only by means of the
passions. It is by their empire that their tyranny must be combated; and it is
always from nature itself that the proper instruments to regulate nature must be
drawn.
Emile is not made to remain always solitary. As a member of society he ought to
fulfill its duties. Since he is made to live with men, he ought to know them. He
knows man in general; it remains for him to know individuals. He knows what is done
in society; it remains for him to see how one lives in it. It is time to show him
the exterior of this great stage, all of whose hidden mechanisms he already knows.
He will bring to it no longer the stupid admiration of a giddy young man, but the
discernment of a sound and exact mind. His passions will doubtless be able to lead
him astray. When do they not lead astray those who yield to them? But at least he
will not be deceived by the passions of others. If he sees them, it will be with
the eyes of the wise man, and he will not be carried away by the example of others
or seduced by their prejudices.
Just as there is a proper age for the study of the sciences, there is a proper age
for getting a good grasp of social practices. Whoever learns these practices too
young follows them throughout his whole life without selectivity, without
reflection, and—despite his competence— without ever having clear knowledge of what
he does. But he who learns these practices and sees the reasons for them follows
them with more discernment and, consequently, with more exactness and grace. Give
me a child of twelve who knows nothing at all; I should return him at fifteen to
you as knowledgeable as the child you have instructed from the earliest age—but
with the difference that your child's knowledge will be only in his memory, while
mine's will be in his judgment. Similarly, introduce a young man of twenty into
society; if he is well guided, in a year he will be more amiable and more
judiciously polite than a young man who has been reared in society from childhood;
for
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EMILE
the former, capable of sensing the reasons for all the forms of conduct related to
a given age, station, and sex—which constitute social custom —can reduce them to
principles and extend them to unforeseen cases; whereas the latter, having nothing
but his routine as a guiding rule, is in trouble as soon as he departs from it.
Young French ladies are all raised in convents until they are married off. Does
anyone perceive that they have any difficulty in adopting these manners which are
so new to them? And will anyone accuse the women of Paris of having a gauche and
awkward bearing or of being ignorant of the ways of society because they have not
been sent into it from childhood? This prejudice comes from society people
themselves, who know nothing more important than this little science and hence
falsely imagine that one cannot begin learning it too soon.
It is true that one ought not to wait too long either. Whoever has spent his whole
youth far from polite society brings to it for the rest of his life an awkward and
constrained bearing, conversation that is always off key, and clumsy and maladroit
manners which the habit of living in society can no longer undo and which are only
made doubly ridiculous by an effort to improve them. Each sort of instruction has
its proper time, which must be known, and its dangers, which must be avoided. It is
above all in learning the ways of society that the dangers multiply, but I do not
expose my pupil to them without precautions to protect him.
When my method deals satisfactorily with all aspects of a single problem and, in
avoiding one difficulty, prevents another, then I judge that my method is good and
that I am on the right path. This is what I believe I see in the expedient it
suggests to me here. If I wish to be austere and dry with my pupil, I shall lose
his confidence, and soon he will hide himself from me. If I wish to be agreeable
and pliant or to close my eyes, what is the use of his being under my protection? I
only authorize his disorder and relieve his conscience at the expense of mine. If I
introduce him to society with the sole aim of instructing him, he will instruct
himself more than I want. If I keep him away from society to the end, what will he
have learned from me? Everything perhaps, except the most necessary art for a man
and a citizen, which is knowing how to live with his fellows. If I attribute to his
efforts a utility which is too far off, it will be as nothing for him. He cares
only about the present. If I am satisfied with providing entertainment for him,
what good am I doing him? He becomes enervated and gets no instruction.
None of that for Emile. My expedient by itself provides for everything. "Your
heart," I say to the young man, "needs a companion. Let us go seek her who suits
you. We shall not easily find her perhaps. True merit is always rare. But let us
neither be in a hurry nor become disheartened. Doubtless there is such a woman and
in the end we shall find her, or at least the one who is most like her." With a
project that is so appealing to him, I introduce him into society. What need have I
to say more? Do you not see that I have done everything?
Imagine whether I shall know how to get his ear when I depict the beloved whom I
destine for him. Imagine whether I shall know how to
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make agreeable and dear to him the qualities he ought to love, whether I shall know
how to make all his sentiments properly disposed with respect to what he ought to
seek or to flee? I would have to be the clumsiest of men not to be able to make him
passionate in advance of his knowing about whom. It is unimportant whether the
object I depict for him is imaginary; it suffices that it make him disgusted with
those that could tempt him; it suffices that he everywhere find comparisons which
make him prefer his chimera to the real objects that strike his eye. And what is
true love itself if it is not chimera, lie, and illusion? We love the image we make
for ourselves far more than we love the object to which we apply it. If we saw what
we love exactly as it is, there would be no more love on earth. When we stop
loving, the person we loved remains the same as before, but we no longer see her in
the same way. The magic veil drops, and love disappears. But, by providing the
imaginary object, I am the master of comparisons, and I easily prevent my young man
from having illusions about real objects.
For all that, I do not want to deceive a young man by depicting for him a model of
perfection which cannot exist. But I shall choose such defects in his beloved as to
suit him, as to please him, and to serve to correct his own. Nor do I want to lie
to him by falsely affirming that the object depicted for him exists. But if he
takes pleasure in the image, he will soon hope that it has an original. From the
hope to the supposition, the path is easy; it is a matter of some skillful
descriptions which clothe this imaginary object with features he can grasp with his
senses and give it a greater air of truth. I would go so far as to give her a name.
I would say, laughing, "Let us call your future beloved Sophie. The name Sophie
augurs well. If the girl whom you choose does not bear it, she will at least be
worthy of bearing it. We can do her the honor in advance." If, after giving all
these details, you neither affirm nor deny her existence but slip out of it by
evasions, his suspicions will turn into certainty. He will believe that you are
keeping a secret about the spouse who is intended for him and that he will see her
when the time has come. Once he is at that point, and if you have chosen well the
features he should be showed, all the rest is easy. He can be exposed to society
almost without risk. Defend him only against his senses; his heart is safe.
But whether or not he believes the model I have succeeded in making lovable to him
is a real person, this model, if well made, will nonetheless attach him to
everything resembling it and will estrange him from everything not resembling it,
just as if his passion had a real object. What an advantage this is for preserving
his heart from the dangers to which his person must be exposed; for repressing his
senses by his imagination; and especially for tearing him away from those ladies
who give an education that is purchased so dearly and who teach a young man good
manners only by taking all decency from him! Sophie is so modest! How will he view
their advances? Sophie has so much simplicity! How will he like their airs? Too
great a distance separates his ideas from his observations for the latter ever to
be dangerous to him.
All those who speak of the governance of children adhere to the same prejudices and
the same maxims, because they observe badly and re-
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EMILE
fleet still worse. It is due to neither temperament nor the senses that the
wildness of youth begins; it is due to opinion. If boys raised in colleges and
girls raised in convents were at issue here, I would make it plain that this is
true even with respect to them; for the first lessons that both get—the only ones
which bear fruit—are those of vice; and it is not nature which corrupts them, it is
example. But let us abandon the students living in colleges and convents to their
bad morals, which will always be irremediable. I am speaking here only of domestic
education. Take a young man soberly raised in his father's home in the country, and
examine him at the moment he arrives in Paris or enters society. You will find that
he is right-thinking about decent things and even that his will is as healthy as
his reason. You will find in him contempt for vice and horror of debauchery. At the
very mention of a prostitute you will see scandalized innocence in his eyes. I
maintain that there is not one such young man who can resolve to enter by himself
the gloomy abodes of these unfortunate women, even if he were to know their use and
to feel the need of them.
Consider the same young man again six months later. You will no longer recognize
him. The easy talk, the fashionable maxims, the jaunty bearing would cause him to
be taken for a different man, if his jokes about his former simplicity, and his
shame when it is recalled to him, did not show that he is the same man and that
this fact makes him blush. O how much he has been educated in so short a time!
Whence comes so great and so sudden a change? From the progress of temperament?
Would his temperament not have made the same progress in his paternal home? And
there, surely, he would have acquired neither this style nor these maxims. From the
first pleasures of the senses? On the contrary. When one begins to yield to these
pleasures, one is fearful and uneasy; one flees broad daylight and gossip. The
first delights are always mysterious. Modesty seasons them and hides them. His
first mistress makes a man not brazen but timid. Totally absorbed in a condition so
new for him, the young man withdraws into himself to enjoy it and constantly dreads
losing it. If he is loud, he is neither voluptuous nor tender. So long as he
boasts, he has not enjoyed.
New ways of thinking have by themselves produced these differences. His heart is
still the same, but his opinions have changed. His sentiments, slower to alter,
will eventually be spoiled by these opinions, and it is only then that he will be
truly corrupted. He has hardly entered society when he receives there a second
education completely opposed to his first, an education from which he learns to
despise what he esteemed and to esteem what he despised. He is made to regard the
lessons of his parents and his masters as a pedantic jargon and the duties they
have preached to him as a puerile morality that ought to be disdained when one has
grown up. He believes himself honor-bound to change his conduct. He becomes a
seducer without desires and a fop out of fear of ridicule. He mocks good morals
before having gotten the taste for bad ones and prides himself on debauchery
without knowing how to be debauched. I shall never forget the admission of a young
officer in the Swiss Guards who was greatly bored by the brazen pleasures of his
comrades but did not dare to abstain for fear of being
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BOOK IV
ridiculed. "I am getting practice at that," he said, "as I am at taking tobacco in
spite of my repugnance. The taste will come from habit. One must not remain a child
forever."
Thus, a young man entering society must be preserved less from sensuality than from
vanity. He yields more to the inclinations of others than to his own, and amour-
propre produces more libertines than love does.
Therefore I ask whether there is a young man on the entire earth who is better
armed than Emile against everything that can attack his morals, his sentiments, or
his principles? Whether there is one better prepared to resist the torrent? For
against what seduction is he not on guard? If his desires lead him to women, he
does not find what he is looking for, and his preoccupied heart holds him back. If
his senses agitate and impel him, where will he find the means of satisfying them?
His horror of adultery and debauchery keeps him away from both prostitutes and
married women, and it is always with one of these two classes of women that the
disorders of youth begin. A marriageable girl may be coquettish, but she will not
be brazen; she will not throw herself at a young man who might marry her if he
believes her to be chaste. Besides, she will have someone looking after her. Nor
will Emile be left completely to himself. Both will at least be guarded by fear and
shame, which are inseparable from our first desires. They will not immediately
proceed to extreme familiarities, and they will not have the time to get to them by
degrees without hindrance. To go about it otherwise, Emile would have to have
already taken lessons from his comrades, to have learned from them to regard his
restraint as ridiculous, and to have become insolent in imitation of them. But who
in the world is less of an imitator than Emile? Who is less governed by ridicule
than the man who has no prejudices and does not know how to concede anything to
those of others? I have worked for twenty years to arm Emile against mockers. They
will need more than a day to make him their dupe; for in his eyes ridicule is only
the argument of fools, and nothing makes one more insensitive to mockery than being
above opinion. Instead of jokes, he has to have reasons; and so long as that is the
case, I am not afraid that wild young men are going to take him from me. I have
conscience and truth on my side. If prejudice has to be mixed in, an attachment of
twenty years is also something. Emile will never be made to believe that I bored
him with vain lessons; and in an honest and sensitive heart, the voice of a
faithful and true friend can surely drown out the cries of twenty seducers. Since
it then becomes only a question of showing him that they deceive him and that, in
feigning to treat him as a man, they really treat him as a child, I shall always
use arguments that are simple but grave and clear, so that he will sense that it is
I who treat him like a man. I shall say to him, "You see that your interest alone,
which is also mine, dictates my speeches; I can have no other interest. But why do
these young people want to persuade you? It is because they want to seduce you.
They do not love you. They take no interest in you. Their whole motive is a secret
spite at seeing that you are better than they are. They want to bring you down to
their low level, and they reproach you for letting
[3311
EMILE
yourself be governed only in order to govern you themselves. Can you believe that
there would be any profit for you in this change? Is their wisdom, then, so
superior, and is their brief attachment to you stronger than mine? To give some
weight to their ridicule, one would have to be able to give some weight to their
authority; but what experience do they have that would make their maxims superior
to ours? All they have done is to imitate other giddy fellows, just as they want to
be imitated in their turn. To set themselves above the alleged prejudices of their
fathers, they enslave themselves to those of their comrades. I do not see what they
gain by that, but I do see that they surely lose two great advantages: paternal
affection, which provides tender and sincere advice; and experience, which allows
one to judge what one knows; for fathers have been children, and children have not
been fathers.
"But do you believe that they are at least sincere in their rash maxims? Not even
that, dear Emile. They deceive themselves in order to deceive you. They are not in
harmony with themselves. Their hearts constantly give them the lie, and their
mouths often contradict them. One man derides everything decent but would be in
despair if his wife thought as he does. Another will extend his indifference about
morals to those of the wife he does not yet have or—the crown of infamy—to those of
the wife he already has. But go farther; speak to him of his mother, and see if he
will gladly be looked upon as a child of adultery and the son of a woman of easy
virtue, as one who has wrongfully assumed a family name, as a thief of the natural
heir's patrimony; finally, see if he will patiently allow himself to be called a
bastard! Who among them will want to have his own daughter dishonored as he
dishonors the daughter of another? There is not one of them who would not make an
attempt upon your very life if in practice you adopted toward him all the
principles he makes an effort to teach you. It is thus that they finally disclose
their inconsistency and that one senses that none of them believes what he says.
These are my arguments, dear Emile. Weigh them against theirs, if they have any,
and compare them. If I wanted to use contempt and ridicule as they do, you would
see that they leave themselves open to ridicule as much as and perhaps more than I
do. But I am not afraid of a serious examination. The triumph of mockers does not
last long. Truth remains, and their foolish laughter vanishes."
You cannot image how Emile can be docile at twenty? How differently we think! I
cannot conceive how he could have been docile at ten, for what hold did I have on
him at that age? It has taken fifteen years of care to contrive this hold for
myself. I did not educate him then; I prepared him to be educated. He is now
sufficiently prepared to be docile. He recognizes the voice of friendship, and he
knows how to obey reason. It is true that I leave him the appearance of
independence, but he was never better subjected to me; for now he is subjected
because he wants to be. As long as I was unable to make myself master of his will,
I remained master of his person; I was never a step away from him. Now I sometimes
leave him to himself, because I govern him always. In leaving him, I embrace him,
and I say to him
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BOOK IV
in a confident manner, "Emile, I entrust you to my friend; I deliver you to his
decent heart. It will answer to me for you!"
It is not the business of a moment to corrupt healthy affections that have suffered
no previous impairment and to blot out principles immediately derived from the
first lights of reason. If some change takes place during my absence, that absence
will never be long enough, and he will never know how to hide himself from me well
enough for me not to perceive the danger before the disease and not be in time to
remedy it. Just as one does not suddenly become depraved, one does not suddenly
learn to dissimulate; and if ever a man was maladroit at this art, it is Emile, who
has not had a single occasion to use it in his life.
By these measures and other similar ones I believe he will be so well protected
against external objects and vulgar maxims that I would rather see him in the midst
of the worst society of Paris than alone in his room or in a park, given over to
all the restlessness of his age. No matter what one does, the most dangerous of all
the enemies that can attack a young man, and the only one that cannot be put out of
the way, is himself. This enemy, however, is dangerous only through our own fault;
for as I have said countless times, the senses are awakened by the imagination
alone. Their need is not properly a physical need. It is not true that it is a true
need. If no lewd object had ever struck our eyes, if no indecent idea had ever
entered our minds, perhaps this alleged need would never have made itself felt to
us, and we would have remained chaste without temptation, without effort, and
without merit. We do not know what mute fermentation certain situations and certain
spectacles arouse in the blood of the young without their being able to discern for
themselves the cause of this first disturbance, a disturbance not easily calmed nor
slow to recur. As for me, the more I reflect on this important crisis and its near
or distant causes, the more I am persuaded that a solitary man raised in a desert,
without books, without instruction, and without women, would die there a virgin at
whatever age he had reached.
But we are not talking here about a savage of this kind. In raising a man among his
fellows for a life in society, it is impossible, it is even counter to my
intention, to keep him always in this salutary ignorance; and the worst situation
for chastity is to be halfway knowledgeable. The memory of objects that have made
an impression upon us, the ideas that we have acquired follow us in our retreat and
people it in spite of ourselves with images more seductive than the objects
themselves; they make solitude as fatal to the man who carries these images to his
retreat as it is useful to the man who has always remained there alone.
Therefore watch the young man carefully. He can protect himself from everything
else, but it is up to you to protect him from himself. Do not leave him alone, day
or night. At the very least, sleep in his room.77 Distrust instinct as soon as you
no longer limit yourself to it. It is good as long as it acts by itself; it is
suspect from the moment it operates within man-made institutions. It must not be
destroyed, but
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EMILE
it must be regulated, and that is perhaps more difficult than annihilating it. It
would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and to
find a substitute for the opportunity of satisfying them. Once he knows this
dangerous supplement, he is lost. From then on he will always have an enervated
body and heart. He will suffer until his death the sad effects of this habit, the
most fatal to which a man can be subjected. Surely, rather than that ... If the
furies of an ardent temperament become invincible, my dear Emile, I pity you; but I
shall not hesitate for a moment, I shall not allow nature's goal to be eluded. If a
tyrant must subjugate you, I prefer to yield you to one from whom I can deliver
you. Whatever happens, I shall tear you away more easily from women than from
yourself.
The body grows until the age of twenty, and it needs all its substance. Continence
then is in accordance with the order of nature, and one can scarcely deviate from
it except at the expense of one's constitution. After the age of twenty continence
is a duty of morality; it is important to learn to rule oneself, to remain the
master of one's appetites. But moral duties have their modifications, their
exceptions, their rules. When human weakness makes a choice inevitable, let us
prefer the lesser of two evils. In any event, it is better to commit an offense
than to contract a vice.
Remember that I am no longer speaking of my pupil here, but of yours. Do his
passions, which you have allowed to ferment, subjugate you? Then yield to them
openly, without disguising his victory from him. If you know how to reveal his
victory to him in its true light, he will be less proud than ashamed of it, and you
will keep the right of guiding him when he strays, so that you can at least make
him avoid the precipices. It is important that the pupil not do anything that the
master does not know about and does not want him to do—even if it is evil; and it
is a hundred times better that the governor approve an offense and deceive himself
than that he be deceived by his pupil and that the offense take place without his
knowing anything about it. He who believes he ought to close his eyes to something
soon finds himself forced to close them to everything; the first abuse that is
tolerated leads to another, and this chain ends only with the overturning of all
order and contempt for all law.
Another error which I have already combated, but which small minds will never
abandon, is that of always affecting magisterial dignity and wanting to pass for a
perfect man in the mind of one's disciple. This method is misconceived. How can
such masters fail to see that in wanting to strengthen their authority, they
destroy it; to make yourself heard, you must put yourself in the place of those you
are addressing, and you must be a man in order to know how to speak to the human
heart? All those perfect people are neither touching nor persuasive. One always
tells oneself that it is quite easy for them to combat passions they do not feel.
Show your weaknesses to your pupil if you want to cure his own. Let him see that
you undergo the same struggles which he experiences. Let him learn to conquer
himself by your example. And do not let him say as other pupils do: "These old men
are spiteful because they are no longer young; they want to treat young
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BOOK IV
people like old men; and because all their desires are extinguished, they treat
ours as a crime."
Montaigne says that one day he asked Seigneur de Langey how many times during his
negotiations with Germany he had gotten drunk in the king's service.7N I would
gladly ask the governor of some young man how often he went to a house of ill fame
in his pupil's service. How many times? I am mistaken. If the first time does not
forever destroy the pupil's desire to return, if he does not bring away repentance
and shame, if he does not shed torrents of tears on your bosom, abandon him
immediately. He is nothing but a monster, or you are nothing but an imbecile. You
will never be of any use to him. But let us pass over these extreme expedients
which are as sad as they are dangerous and have no relation to our education.
How many precautions must be taken with a well-born young man before exposing him
to the scandalous morals of our age! These precautions are difficult, but they are
indispensable. It is negligence on this point which dooms all our young people; it
is due to the disorder of their early life that men degenerate and that one sees
them become what they are today. Vile and cowardly even in their vices, they have
only small souls because their worn-out bodies were corrupted early. There hardly
remains enough life in them to move. Their subtle thoughts are signs of minds
without substance. They do not know how to feel anything great and noble; they have
neither simplicity nor vigor. Abject in all things and basely wicked, they are only
vain, rascally, and false; they do not even have enough courage to be illustrious
criminals. Such are the contemptible men who form the scum of our youth. If there
were a single man amongHhem who knew how to be temperate and sober and who knew how
in their midst to preserve his heart, his blood, and his morals from the contagion
of their example-,-at. the age of thirty he would crush all these insects and
become their master with less effort than he had exerted in remaining his own
master!
No matter how little birth and fortune had done for Emile, he would be that man if
he wanted to be. But he would despise these young men too much to deign to enslave
them. Let us see him now in their midst, entering society not in order to excel in
it, but to know it and to find there a companion worthy of him.
In whatever rank he may have been born, into whatever society he begins to enter,
his debut will be simple and without brilliance. God forbid that he be unfortunate
enough to shine. The qualities which strike people at first glance are not his. He
neither has them nor wants to have them. He values men's judgments too little to
value their prejudices, and he does not care to be esteemed before being known. His
way of presenting himself is neither modest nor vain; it is natural and true. He
knows neither embarrassment nor disguise, and in the midst of a group he is the
same as he is when he is alone and without any witnesses. Will he therefore be
coarse, disdainful, heedless of everyone? On the contrary. When he is alone, he
does not think that other men count for nothing. Why would he think that they count
for nothing when he lives among them? He does not prefer other men to himself in
his manners because he does not prefer them to himself in his heart.
[335]
EMILE
But neither does he display to them an indifference which he is very far from
having. If he does not use polite formulas, he does have humane concerns. He does
not like to see anyone suffer. He will not offer his place to someone else out of
affectation, but he will gladly yield it out of goodness if he sees that someone
else is forgotten and judges that the man is mortified by this neglect. For it will
cost my young man less to remain standing voluntarily than to see the other person
forced to remain standing.
Although in general Emile does not esteem men, he will not show contempt for them,
because he pities them and is touched by them. Unable to give them the taste for
things that are really good, he leaves them with the things that are good according
to popular opinion, with which they are contented. Otherwise, by taking these
things from them to no avail, he will make them unhappier than before. Therefore,
he is not disputatious or contradictory; neither is he accommodating and
flattering. He gives his opinion without combating anyone else's, because he loves
freedom above everything and frankness is one of the finest of rights.
He speaks little because he hardly cares whether any attention is paid to him. For
the same reason he says only useful things; otherwise, who would engage him in
conversation? Emile is too well informed ever to be talkative. Babbling inevitably
comes either from pretentions to cleverness—about which I shall speak hereafter—or
from the value we give to bagatelles which we foolishly believe others care about
as much as we do. He who knows enough about things to assign them all their true
value never speaks too much, for he also knows how to evaluate the attention paid
to him and the interest that can be taken in his conversation. Generally people who
know little speak a great deal, and people who know a great deal speak little. It
is easy for an ignoramus to find everything he knows important and to tell it to
everyone. But a well-informed man does not easily open up his repertoire. He would
have too much to say, and he sees yet more to be said after he has spoken. He keeps
quiet.
Far from shocking others, Emile is quite willing to conform to their ways—not to
appear knowledgeable about social practice or to affect the airs of an elegant man;
but, on the contrary, he does so for fear of being singled out, in order to avoid
being noticed. And he is never more at ease than when no attention is paid to him.
Although he is absolutely ignorant of the ways of the world when he enters it, this
does not make him timid and fearful. If he conceals himself, it is not due to
embarrassment; it is because in order to see well one must not be seen. What people
think of him hardly bothers him, and ridicule does not frighten him in the least.
The result is that he is always serene and cool and never troubled by shame.
Whether he is observed or not, he always does his best; and since he is always
entirely self-possessed in order to observe others well, he grasps their practices
with a facility that the slaves of opinion cannot match. It may be said that he
more readily adopts the practices of society precisely because he cares so little
about them.
Do not deceive yourself about his comportment, however, and do not
[336]
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try to compare it to that of your young charmers. He is firm and not conceited. His
manners are free and not disdainful. An insolent air belongs only to slaves;
independence has nothing affected about it. I have never seen a man who has pride
in his soul display it in his bearing. This affectation is far more fitting for
vile and vain souls who can make an impression only in that way. I read in a book
that when a foreigner presented himself one day at the studio of the famous
Marcel,79 the latter asked him what country he came from. "I am English," responded
the foreigner. "You, English?" replied the dancer. "You are from that island where
the citizens take part in public administration and have a portion of the sovereign
power? * No, sir, this hanging head, this timid glance, this uncertain bearing
proclaim to me only the titled slave of a German Elector."
I do not know whether this judgment reveals a great knowledge of the true relation
which exists between a man's character and his exterior. As for me, since I do not
have the honor of being a dancing master, I would have thought exactly the
opposite. I would have said, "This Englishman is not a courtier. I have never heard
it said that courtiers have hanging heads or an uncertain bearing. A man who is
timid at a dancer's studio might very well not be timid in the House of Commons."
Certainly, this M. Marcel must take his compatriots for nothing but Romans.
When one loves, one wants to be loved. Emile loves men; therefore he wants to
please them. A fortiori, he wants to please women. His age, his morals, and his
project all unite to foster this desire. I say his morals, for they have a great
deal to do with it. Men who have morals are the true worshipers of women. They do
not have that mocking jargon of gallantry as the others do, but they have a truer
and more tender eagerness which comes from the heart. In the presence of a young
woman, I could pick out a man who has morals and is in command of his nature from a
hundred thousand debauches. Judge what Emile must be like, with a wholly fresh
temperament and so many reasons for resisting it! I believe he will sometimes be
timid and embarrassed in the company of women. But surely this will not be
displeasing to them, and even the least roguish women will only too often possess
the art of taking advantage of his embarrassment and increasing it. Moreover, his
eagerness will noticeably change its form according to a woman's status. He will be
more modest and more respectful toward married women, and livelier and more tender
with marriageable girls. He does not lose sight of the object of his search, and he
always pays the most attention to what reminds him of that search.
No one will be more exact than Emile in observing all the signs of respect that are
founded on the order of nature and even on the good order of society; but he will
always prefer the former to the latter, and
* As if there were citizens who were not members of the city, and who did not as
such have a part of the sovereign authority! But the French, having judged it
suitable to usurp the respectable name of citizens—a name formerly merited by the
members of the Gallic cities—have denatured the idea of citizenship to the point
where one no longer has any conception of it. A man who just wrote me a pack of
stupidities against La Nouvelle Heloise adorned his signature with the title
"Citizen of Paimboeuf" and believed he had made an excellent joke at my expense.80
[337]
EMILE
he will respect a private man older than himself more than a magistrate of his own
age. Since he will ordinarily be one of the youngest members of the society in
which he finds himself, he will always be one of the most modest—not out of a
desire to appear humble founded upon vanity, but out of a sentiment that is both
natural and founded on reason. He will not have the impertinent savoir-vivre of a
young fop who, in order to amuse the company, speaks louder than the wise and
interrupts the old. He will not justify the response given to Louis XV by an old
gentleman who was asked by the king whether he preferred his own time or the
present: "Sire, I spent my youth respecting the old, and I have to spend my old age
respecting children."
Emile possesses a tender and sensitive soul, but he values nothing according to the
price set by opinion; thus, although he likes to please others, he will care little
about being esteemed by them. From this it follows that he will be more
affectionate than polite, that he will never put on airs or make a display, and
that he will be more touched by a caress than by a thousand praises. For the same
reasons he will neglect neither his manners nor his bearing. He may even take some
care with his dress, not in order to appear to be a man of taste but to make his
looks more agreeable. He will not resort to the gilded frame, and his clothing will
never be stained by the mark of riches.
It can be seen that all this does not require a display of precepts from me and is
only an effect of his first education. The practices of society are made out to be
a great mystery, as though at the age when these practices are acquired one did not
take to them naturally and as though their first laws were not to be found in a
decent heart! True politeness consists in showing benevolence to men. It reveals
itself without difficulty when one possesses it. It is only for the man who does
not possess true politeness that one is forced to make an art of its outward forms.
The most unfortunate effect of formal politeness is to teach the art of getting
along without the virtues it imitates. Let humanity and beneficence be inspired in
us by education, and we shall have politeness, or we shall no longer need it.
If we do not possess the politeness heralded by the graces, we shall have that
politeness which heralds the decent man and the citizen; we shall not need to
resort to falseness.
Instead of being artificial in order to please, it will suffice to be good. Instead
of being false in order to flatter the weaknesses of others, it will suffice to be
indulgent.
Those whom one treats in such a way will neither have their pride flattered nor be
corrupted. They will only be grateful and will be made better. *
It seems to me that if any education ought to produce the kind of politeness which
M. Duclos calls for here, it is the one I have outlined up to now.
I agree, however, that with maxims so different from theirs, Emile
* Considerations sur les moeurs de ce siecle by M. Duclos, p. 65.
[338]
BOOK IV
will not be like everyone else, and God preserve him from ever being so. But he
will be neither troublesome nor ridiculous in his difference from others. This
difference will be noticeable without being offensive. Emile will be, you might
say, a likable foreigner. At first they will pardon him his singularities by
saying, "He will develop." Later they will be completely accustomed to his ways,
and since they see that he does not change, they will pardon him again by saying,
"That's the way he is."
He will not be celebrated as a likable man, but they will like him without knowing
why. No one will vaunt Emile's intelligence, but he will be gladly taken as a judge
among intelligent men. His intelligence will be sharp and limited. He will have
solid sense and healthy judgment. As he never runs after new ideas, he could not
pride himself on his cleverness. I have made him feel that all the ideas which are
salutary and truly useful to men were the first to be known; that in all times they
constitute the only true bonds of society; and that the only way transcendent minds
can now distinguish themselves is by means of ideas that are pernicious and
destructive for mankind.
This way of becoming admired does not appeal to him very much. He knows where he
ought to find the happiness of his life and how he can contribute to the happiness
of others. The sphere of his knowledge does not extend farther than what is
profitable. His route is narrow and well marked. He is not tempted to leave it, and
so he remains indistinguishable from those who follow it. He wants neither to stray
from his path nor to shine. Emile is a man of good sense, and he does not want to
be anything else. One may very well try to insult him by this title; he will stick
to it and always feel honored by it.
Although his desire to please does not leave him absolutely indifferent to the
opinion of others, he will concern himself with their opinion only insofar as it
relates immediately to his person, and he will not worry about arbitrary
evaluations whose only law is fashion or prejudice. He will have the pride to want
to do everything he does well, even to do it better than another. He will want to
be the swiftest at running, the strongest at wrestling, the most competent at
working, the most adroit at games of skill. But he will hardly seek advantages
which are not clear in themselves and which need to be established by another's
judgment, such as being more intelligent than someone else, talking better, being
more learned, etc.; still less will he seek those advantages which are not at all
connected with one's person, such as being of nobler birth, being esteemed richer,
more influential, or more respected, or making an impression by greater pomp.
He loves men because they are his fellows, but he will especially love those who
resemble him most because he will feel that he is good; and since he judges this
resemblance by agreement in moral taste, he will be quite gratified to be approved
in everything connected with good character. He will not precisely say to himself,
"I rejoice because they approve of me," but rather, "I rejoice because they approve
of what I have done that is good. I rejoice that the people who honor me do
themselves honor. So long as they judge so soundly, it will be a fine thing to
obtain their esteem."
[339]
EMILE
While studying men's morals in society, as he previously studied their passions in
history, he will often have occasion to reflect on what delights or offends the
human heart. Now he is philosophizing about the principles of taste, and this is
the study which suits him during this period.
The farther afield one goes in seeking definitions of taste, the more one loses
one's way. Taste is only the faculty of judging what pleases or displeases the
greatest number. Abandon that, and you no longer know what taste is. It does not
follow that there are more people who have taste than others who lack it; for
although the majority judge each object soundly, there are few men who judge as the
majority do about everything. And although the conjunction of the most general
tastes constitutes good taste, there are few people who have taste—just as there
are few beautiful persons despite the fact that the union of the most common
features constitutes beauty.
It should be noted that we are not dealing here with what we love because it is
useful to us nor with what we hate because it harms us. Taste is exercised only in
regard to things which are neutral or which are at most of interest as
entertainment, and not in regard to those things connected with our needs. To judge
the latter, taste is not necessary. Appetite alone suffices. This is what makes
pure decisions of taste so difficult and, it seems, so arbitrary; for, apart from
the instinct which determines it, one no longer sees the reason for these
decisions. One must also distinguish between its laws in moral things and its laws
in physical things. In regard to the latter the principles of taste seem absolutely
inexplicable. But it is important to observe that something moral enters into
everything connected with imitation.* In this way one can explain beauties which
appear physical and which really are not. I shall add that taste has local rules
which in countless things make it depend on climates, morals, government,
institutions; that it has other rules connected with age, sex, character; and that
it is in this sense that tastes should not be disputed.
Taste is natural to all men, but they do not all have it to the same degree; it
does not develop in all men to the same degree; and in all it is subject to
corruption due to diverse causes. The level of taste a man may reach depends on the
sensitivity with which he has been endowed. The cultivation of taste and its form
depend on the societies in which one has lived. First, one must live in societies
with many members in order to make many comparisons. Second, one needs societies
dedicated to entertainment and idleness; for societies dedicated to business are
ruled not by pleasure but by interest. In the third place, one needs societies
where inequality is not too great, where the tyranny of opinion is limited and
where voluptuousness reigns more than vanity does; for in the opposite case,
fashion stifles taste, and people no longer seek what pleases them but seek rather
what distinguishes them.
In this latter case, it is no longer true that good taste is that of the greatest
number. Why is that? Because the object of taste changes. Then
* This is proved in an essay on the Principles of Melody which will be found in the
collection of my writings.81
[340]
BOOK IV
the multitude no longer has judgment of its own. It now judges only according to
the views of those whom it believes more enlightened than itself. It approves not
what is good but what they have approved. In all times, see to it that each man has
his own sentiments, and the plurality of votes will always go to what is most
agreeable in itself.
In their works men make nothing beautiful except by imitation. All the true models
of taste are in nature. The farther we move from this master, the more our
paintings are disfigured. It is then that we draw our models from the objects we
love; and beauty which has its source in whim is subject to caprice and authority
and is no longer anything other than what pleases those who lead us.
Those who lead us are the artists, the nobles, and the rich, and what leads them is
their interest or their vanity. The rich, in order to display their wealth, and the
artists, in order to take advantage of that wealth, vie in the quest for new means
of expense. This is the basis on which great luxury establishes its empire and
leads people to love what is difficult and costly. Then what is claimed to be
beautiful, far from imitating nature, is beautiful only by dint of thwarting it.
This is how luxury and bad taste become inseparable. Wherever taste is expensive,
it is false.
It is especially in the relations between the two sexes that taste, good or bad,
gets its form. Its cultivation is a necessary effect of the aim of these relations.
But when the ease of enjoyment cools the desire to please, taste must degenerate;
and this, it seems to me, is another very evident reason why good taste depends on
good morals.
Consult the taste of women in physical things connected with the judgment of the
senses, but consult the taste of men in moral things that depend more on the
understanding. When women are what they ought to be, they will limit themselves to
things within their competence and will always judge well. But since they have
established themselves as the arbiters of literature, since they have set about
judging books and relentlessly producing them, they no longer know anything.
Authors who consult the learned ladies about their works are always sure of being
badly counseled. The gallants who consult them about their dress are always
ridiculously attired. I shall soon have occasion to speak of the true talents of
this sex, of the way to cultivate them, and of the things about which its decisions
ought then to be heard.
These are the elementary considerations that I shall set down as principles in
reasoning with my Emile about a matter which is far from indifferent to him in his
present circumstances—and in the quest that occupies him. And to whom should it be
indifferent? Knowledge of what can be agreeable or disagreeable to men is necessary
not only to someone who needs men but also to someone who wishes to be useful to
them. It is even important to please them in order to serve them, and the art of
writing is far from an idle study when one uses it to make the truth heard.
If, in order to cultivate my disciple's taste, I had to choose between taking him
to countries where there has not yet been any cultivation of taste and to others
where taste has already degenerated, I would proceed
[34i]
EMILE
in reverse order. That is, I would begin his tour with the latter countries and end
with the former. This reason for this choice is that taste is corrupted by an
excessive delicacy which creates a sensitivity to things that the bulk of men do
not perceive. This delicacy leads to a spirit of discussion, for the more subtle
one is about things, the more they multiply. This subtlety makes feelings more
delicate and less uniform. Then as many tastes are formed as there are individuals.
In the disputes about preference, philosophy and enlightenment are extended, and it
is in this way that one learns to think. Fine observations can hardly be made
except by people who get around a lot, given that those observations strike us only
after all the others and that people unaccustomed to large societies exhaust their
attention on the gross features of things. At the present time there is perhaps not
a civilized place on earth where the general taste is worse than in Paris.
Nevertheless it is in this capital that good taste is cultivated, and there appear
few books esteemed in Europe whose author has not been in Paris for the purpose of
forming himself. Those who think that it suffices to read the books produced there
are mistaken. One learns much more in conversation with authors than in their
books, and the authors themselves are not those from whom one learns the most. It
is the spirit of societies which develops a thoughtful mind and extends our vision
as far as it can go. If you have a spark of genius, go and spend a year in Paris.
Soon you will be all that you can be, or you will never be anything.
One can learn to think in places where bad taste reigns; but one must not think as
do those who have this bad taste—and it is quite difficult for this not to happen
when one stays among them too long. With their assistance one must perfect the
instrument which judges, while avoiding using it as they do. I shall be careful not
to polish Emile's judgment so much as to spoil it, and when his feelings are
refined enough to sense and compare men's diverse tastes, I shall bring him back to
simpler objects to establish his own taste.
I shall go further still to preserve in him a pure and healthy taste. Amidst the
tumult of dissipation I shall know how to arrange useful discussions with him; and
by always directing these discussions toward objects which please him, I shall take
care to make them as enjoyable to him as they are instructive. This is the time for
reading, for reading enjoyable books. This is the time to teach him how to analyze
speech, to make him sensitive to all the beauties of eloquence and diction. It is
trivial to learn languages for their own sake; their use is not as important as
people believe. But the study of languages leads to that of grammar. Latin has to
be learned in order to know French. Both must be studied and compared in order to
understand the rules of the art of speaking.
There is, moreover, a certain simplicity of taste that speaks straight to the heart
and is found only in the writings of the ancients. In eloquence, in poetry, in
every kind of literature Emile will again find the ancients—as he found them in
history—rich in facts and sparing in judgments. Our authors, by contrast, say
little and make many pronouncements. Constantly to give us their judgment as the
law is not the way to form our judgment. The difference between the two tastes
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BOOK IV
makes itself felt in all monuments, even including tombs. Our tombstones are
covered with praise; on those of the ancients one read facts.
Sta viator, Heroem calcas 82
Even if I had found this epitaph on an ancient monument, I would have immediately
guessed that it was modern; for nothing is so ordinary among us as heroes, but
among the ancients they were rare. Instead of saying that a man was a hero, they
would have said what he had done to become one. To the epitaph of this hero compare
that of the effeminate Sardanapalus:
I built Tarsus and Anchialus in a day and now I am dead.**
Which says more in your opinion? Our bombastic lapidary style is good only for
inflating dwarfs. The ancients showed men as they are naturally, and one saw that
they were men. Xenophon, honoring the memory of some warriors who were
treacherously killed during the retreat of the ten thousand, says, "They died
irreproachable in war and in friendship." s4 That is all. But consider what must
have filled the author's heart in writing this short and simple eulogy. Woe unto
him who does not find that entrancing!
One read these words carved in marble at Thermopylae:
Passer-by, tell them at Sparta that we died here to obey
her holy laws.*r'
It is quite obvious that it was not the Academy of Inscriptions which wrote that.
I am mistaken if my pupil, who sets so little store by words, does not immediately
turn his attention to these differences, and if they do not influence his choice of
reading. Drawn by the masculine eloquence of Demosthenes, he will say, "This is an
orator." But in reading Cicero, he will say, "This is a lawyer."
In general, Emile will get more of a taste for the books of the ancients than for
ours, for the sole reason that the ancients, since they came first, are closest to
nature and their genius is more their own. Whatever La Motte and the Abbe Terrasson
may have said, there is no true progress of reason in the human species, because
all that is gained on one side is lost on the other: all minds always start from
the same point, and since the time used in finding out what others have thought is
wasted for learning to think for ourselves, we have acquired more enlightenment and
less vigor of mind. We exercise our minds, like our arms, by having them do
everything with tools and nothing by themselves. Fontenelle said that this whole
dispute about ancients and moderns comes down to knowing whether the trees in the
past were bigger than those today.s,; If agriculture had changed, it would not be
impertinent to ask this question.
After having thus helped Emile ascend to the sources of pure litera-
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EMILE
ture, I also show him its sewers in the reservoirs of modern compilers, newspapers,
translations, and dictionaries. He casts a glance at all this, then leaves it never
to return. In order to amuse him, I have him listen to the chatter of the
academies; I see to it that he notices that the individuals who compose the
academies are always worth more alone than as part of the group. He will draw for
himself the implication about the utility of all these fine establishments.
I take him to the theater to study not morals but taste, for it is here that taste
reveals itself to those who know how to reflect. "Leave aside precepts and
morality," I would say to him, "it is not here that they are to be learned." The
theater is not made for the truth. It is made to delight, to entertain men. There
is no school in which one learns so well the art of pleasing men and of interesting
the human heart. The study of the theater leads to that of poetry. They have
exactly the same aim. If he has a spark of taste for it, with what pleasure he will
cultivate the languages of the poets—Greek, Latin, and Italian! These studies will
be entertainments without constraint for him, and thus he will profit all the more
from them. They will be delicious to him at an age and in circumstances when his
interest is aroused by the great charm of all the sorts of beauty capable of
touching the heart. Picture my Emile, on the one hand, and a young college scamp,
on the other, reading the fourth book of the Aeneid, or Tibullus, or Plato's
Banquet. What a difference! How much the heart of the one is stirred by what does
not even affect the other. O good young man, stop, suspend your reading. I see that
you are too moved. I certainly want the language of love to please you, but I do
not want it to lead you astray. Be a sensitive man, but also a wise one. If you are
only one of the two, you are nothing. Moreover, I care little whether he succeeds
or not at the dead languages, at letters, at poetry. He will be worth no less if he
knows none of all that, and it is not with all these trifles that his education is
concerned.
My principle aim in teaching him to feel and to love the beautiful of all sorts is
to fix his affections and tastes on it, to prevent his natural appetites from
becoming corrupted, and to see to it that he does not one day seek in his riches
the means for being happy—means that he ought to find nearer to him. I have said
elsewhere that taste is only the art of knowing all about petty things, and that is
very true. But since the agreeableness of life depends on a tissue of petty things,
such concerns are far from being matters of indifference. It is through such
concerns that we learn to fill life with the good things within our reach in all
the truth they can have for us. I am talking here not about the moral goods which
depend on the good disposition of the soul, but only about what is connected with
sensuality and with real voluptuousness, apart from prejudices and opinion.
Permit me for a moment, in order to develop my idea better, to leave aside Emile,
whose pure and healthy heart can no longer serve as a rule for anyone, and to seek
in myself an example that is more evident and closer to the morals of the reader.
There are situations which seem to change our nature and to recast, for better or
worse, the men who fill them. A poltroon becomes brave
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BOOK IV
upon entering the regiment of Navarre. It is not only in the military that one gets
esprit de corps, and its effects are not always to the good. I have a hundred times
thought with terror that if I had the misfortune today of filling a particular
position in a certain country, tomorrow I would almost inevitably be a tyrant, an
extortionist, a destroyer of the people, and a source of harm to the prince; due to
my situation I would be an enemy of all humanity, of all equity, of every sort of
virtue.
Similarly, if I were rich, I would have done everything necessary to become so. I
would therefore be insolent and low, sensitive and delicate toward myself alone,
pitiless and hard toward everyone else, a disdainful spectactor of the miseries of
the rabble—for I would no longer give any other name to the indigent, in order to
make people forget that I once belonged to their class. Finally, I would make my
fortune the instrument of my pleasures, with which I would be wholly occupied. Up
to this point I would be like all other rich men.
But I believe I would differ from them very much by being sensual and voluptuous
rather than proud and vain and by devoting myself to indolent luxury far more than
to ostentatious luxury. I would even be somewhat ashamed to display my riches too
much; I would always believe I saw the envious man whom I had overwhelmed with my
pomp saying into his neighbor's ear, "Here is a rascal who is very much afraid of
being known for what he is!"
From this immense profusion of goods which cover the earth I would seek what is
most agreeable to me and what I could best make use of. To that end, the first use
of my riches would be to purchase leisure and freedom, to which I would add health,
if it were for sale. But since it is purchased only with temperance and since there
is no true pleasure in life without health, I would be temperate out of sensuality.
I would always stay as close as possible to nature, in order to indulge the senses
I received from nature—quite certain that the more nature contributed to my
enjoyments, the more reality I would find in them. In choosing objects for
imitation, I would always take nature as my model; in my appetites I would always
give it preference; in my tastes I would always consult it; in foods I would always
want those which are best prepared by nature and pass through the fewest hands
before reaching our tables. I would prevent myself from becoming the victim of
fraudulent adulterations by going out after pleasure myself. My foolish and coarse
gluttony would not enrich an innkeeper. He would not sell me terribly expensive
poison in the guise of fish. My table would not be covered with a display of
magnificent garbage and exotic carrion. I would lavish my own efforts on the
satisfaction of my sensuality, since then those efforts are themselves a pleasure
and thus add to the pleasure one expects from them. If I wanted to taste a dish
from the end of the earth, I would, like Apicius," go and seek it out rather than
have it brought to me. For the most exquisite dishes always lack a seasoning that
does not travel with them and no cook can give them: the air of the climate which
produced them.
For the same reason I would not imitate those who are never contented with where
they are and thus always put the seasons in contradiction with one another and the
climate in contradiction with the
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season. These are the people who seek summer in winter and winter in summer, who go
to Italy when it is cold and to the north when it is warm, unaware that in
intending to escape the rigor of the seasons they encounter it in places where men
have not learned to protect themselves from it. I would remain where I was, or I
would take exactly the opposite course. I would want to extract from each season
all that is agreeable in it and from each climate all that is peculiar to it. I
would have a diversity of pleasures and habits which would not resemble one another
and which would always be part of nature. I would go to spend the summer at Naples
and the winter at Petersburg—now inhaling a gentle breeze while reclining in the
cool grottoes of Tarentum, now enjoying the illuminations of an ice palace, out of
breath and exhausted by the pleasures of the ball.
In the setting of my table and the decorating of my dwelling, I would want to
imitate the variety of the seasons with very simple ornaments and to extract all
its delights from each season without anticipating the ones that will follow it. It
takes effort—and not taste—to disturb the order of nature, to wring from it
involuntary produce which it gives reluctantly and with its curse. Such produce has
neither quality nor savor; it can neither nourish the stomach nor delight the
palate. Nothing is more insipid than early fruits and vegetables. It is only at
great expense that the rich man of Paris succeeds, with his stoves and hothouses,
in having bad vegetables and bad fruits on his table the whole year round. If I
could have cherries when it is freezing and amber-colored melons in the heart of
winter, what pleasure would I take in them when my palate needs neither moistening
nor cooling? Would the heavy chestnut be very agreeable to me during the broiling
dog days of summer? Would I prefer it—straight from the oven—to currants,
strawberries, and other refreshing fruits that the earth offers me without so much
trouble? To cover the mantel of one's fireplace in the month of January with forced
vegetation, with pale and odorless flowers, is less to embellish winter than to
spoil spring; it is to take away the pleasure of going into the woods to seek the
first violet, spy out the first bud, and shout in a fit of joy, "Mortals, you have
not been abandoned; nature still lives."
In order to be well served, I would have few domestics. This has already been said,
and it is well to say it yet again. A bourgeois gets more true service from his
only lackey than a duke gets from the ten gentlemen surrounding him. I have a
hundred times thought that, with my glass beside me at the table, I drink at the
instant I please; whereas if I dined in grand style, twenty voices would have to
repeat "Drink" before I could quench my thirst. Try as you will, all that is done
by means of other people is done badly. I would not send someone to shop for me, I
would go myself. I would go in order to prevent my servants from making deals with
the shopkeepers and to choose more surely and pay less dearly. I would go in order
to take some agreeable exercise, to see a bit of what goes on outside of the house—
it is entertaining, and sometimes it is instructive. Finally I would go in order to
go—that is always something. Boredom begins with too sedentary a life.
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When one goes out a great deal, one rarely gets bored. A porter and some lackeys
are poor interpreters. I would not want to have these people always between me and
the rest of the world, nor would I want always to move accompanied by the roar of a
carriage, as though I were afraid of being approached. The horses of a man who uses
his legs are always ready. If his horses are tired or sick, he knows it before
anyone, and he is not afraid of being obliged to give this excuse for staying at
home when his coachman decides to take off on a lark. On the road countless delays
do not make him fidget impatiently or stand still at the moment when he would want
to hurry ahead. In sum, if no one ever serves us so well as ourselves—even if we
were more powerful than Alexander or richer than Croesus—we ought to receive from
others only the services that we cannot get from ourselves.
I would not want to have a palace for a dwelling, for in that palace I would
inhabit only one room. Every common room belongs to no one, and the room of each of
my servants would be as foreign to me as that of my neighbor. The Orientals,
although quite voluptuous, have simple houses and furniture. They regard life as a
journey, and their home as a way station. This argument has little effect on us
rich people who are arranging to live forever; but I have a different one which
would produce the same effect. It would seem to me that to set myself up with so
much gear in one place would be to banish myself from all others and to imprison
myself, so to speak, in my palace. The world itself is a fine enough palace. Does
not everything belong to the rich man when he wants to enjoy himself? Ubi bene, ibi
patria 8K is his motto; his lares are the places where money can buy anything; his
country is wherever his strongbox can go, just as Philip possessed every fortress
where a mule bearing money could enter. w> Why then be circumscribed by walls and
by gates as though one were never to leave? Does an epidemic, a war, a revolt drive
me out of some place? I go to another and find my mansion has gotten there before
me. Why bother building mansions for myself, when others do it for me throughout
the universe? Since I am in such a hurry to live, why prepare so far in advance
enjoyments that are available to me right now? No one could make an agreeable lot
for himself if he were constantly living in contradiction with himself. It is thus
that Empedocles reproached the Agrigentines for cramming in pleasures as though
they had only a day to live and building as though they were never going to die.""
Moreover, what is the use of so vast a lodging to me, since I have so little with
which to people it and less with which to fill it? My furnishings would be as
simple as my tastes. I would have neither gallery nor library, especially if I
liked reading and knew something about paintings. I would then know that such
collections are never complete and that the absence of what is lacking causes more
chagrin than having nothing at all. In this, abundance makes poverty; there is not
a single collector who has not experienced it. When someone has knowledge of such
things, he ought not to make collections. A man has no study to show to others when
he knows how to use it for himself.
Gambling is not a rich man's entertainment; it is the resource of the
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EMILE
unemployed; and my pleasures would give me too much activity to leave me much time
to fill so poorly. Since I am solitary and poor, I do not gamble at all, except
sometimes at chess, and even that is too much. If I were rich, I would gamble still
less and only for very small stakes, in order not to see any malcontents and not to
be one. Since the opulent man lacks a motive for gambling, his interest in it can
never turn into a rage, except if he has an ill-constituted mind. The profits that
a rich man can make at gambling are always less perceptible to him than his losses.
And since gambling for moderate stakes—where the winnings are played away in the
long run—in general winds up producing more losses than gains, anyone who reasons
well cannot be very fond of an entertainment in which the risks of every sort are
against him. Whoever feeds his vanity on the preferences of fortune can seek them
in much more piquant objects, and these preferences are no more marked in the
smallest game than in the biggest. The taste for gambling is the fruit of avarice
and boredom, and it takes hold only in an empty mind and heart; it seems to me that
I would have enough sentiment and knowledge to do without such a supplement. One
rarely sees thinkers enjoying themselves much in gambling, which interrupts the
habit of thinking or turns it to arid combinations of elements. Thus one of the
good things, and perhaps the only one, which the taste for the sciences has
produced is to deaden this sordid passion a bit; people would rather exert
themselves to prove the utility of gambling than to indulge in it. I would combat
gambling among gamblers, and I would get more pleasure out of ridiculing them when
they lose than out of winning their money.
I would be the same in my private life and in my social relations. I would want my
fortune to provide ease everywhere and never to create a feeling of inequality.
Garishness of dress is inconvenient in countless respects. In order to retain all
possible liberty, when I am among other men, I would want to be dressed in such a
way that in every rank I appeared to be in my place, and that I did not stand out
in any—so that without affectation and without changing my appearance I could be
one of the people at the guinguette and good company at the Palais-Royal."1 In this
way I would be more the master of my conduct, and I would put the pleasures of all
stations always within my reach. It is said that there are women who close their
doors on embroidered cuffs and receive no one who does not wear lace. I would go
and spend my day elsewhere. But if these women were young and pretty, I could
sometimes put on lace in order to spend—at the very most—the night there.
The only bond of my associations would be mutual attachment, agreement of tastes,
suitableness of characters. I would give myself over to them as a man and not as
one of the rich. I would never permit their charms to be poisoned by interest. If
my opulence had left me some humanity, I would extend my services and my
benefactions at a distance, but I would want to have a society around me, not a
court; friends, and not proteges. I would not be the patron of my guests; I would
be their host. This independence and equality would permit my
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relationships to have all the candor of benevolence; and where neither duty nor
interest entered in any way, pleasure and friendship would alone make the law.
Neither a friend nor a mistress can be bought. It is easy to have women with money,
but that way one is never the lover of any of them. Far from being for sale, love
is infallibly killed by money. Whoever pays for it—even if he is the most lovable
of men—by that fact alone cannot be loved for long. Soon he will be paying for
another man, or, rather, that other man will be paid with his money. And in this
double liaison—-formed by interest and debauchery, without love, without honor,
without true pleasure—the greedy, unfaithful, and miserable woman is treated by the
vile man who takes her money as she treats the foolish man who gives it to her, and
thus she breaks even between the two. It would be sweet to be liberal toward the
person one loves, if this did not constitute a purchase. I know only one way of
satisfying this inclination toward one's mistress without poisoning love. It is to
give her everything and then to be supported by her. It remains to be known where
there is a woman with whom this procedure would not be a folly.
He who said, "I possess Lais without her possessing me," <J2 uttered a witless
phrase. Possession which is not reciprocal is nothing. It is at most possession of
the sexual organ, not of the individual. Now, where the moral aspect of love is not
present, why make so great a business of the rest? Nothing is so easy to find. A
mule driver is in that respect closer to happiness than is a millionaire.
Oh, if one could sufficiently unfold the inconsistencies of vice, how wide of its
mark one would find it, precisely when it gets what it wanted! Why this barbarous
avidity to corrupt innocence, to make a victim of a young person who ought to have
been protected, and who by this first step is inevitably dragged into an abyss of
miseries from which she will emerge only at death? Brutality, vanity, folly, error,
and nothing more. The pleasure itself does not come from nature; it comes from
opinion, and from the vilest opinion, since it is connected with self-contempt. He
who feels himself to be the basest of men fears comparison with all others and
wants to be the first to get there in order to be less odious. Consider whether
those most avid for this imaginary dish are ever lovable young people, worthy of
winning favor, who would be more excusable for being hard to please? No, someone
who has looks, merit, and sentiments has little to fear from an experienced
mistress. With justified confidence, such a man says to her, "You know the
pleasures. It makes no difference. My heart promises you pleasures you have never
known."
But an old satyr—worn out by debauchery, without charm, without respect, without
consideration, without any kind of decency, incapable and unworthy of pleasing any
woman who knows anything about lovable people—believes he can make up for all that
with a young innocent by taking advantage of her inexperience and stirring her
senses for the first time. His last hope is to be attractive by means of novelty.
That is incontestably the secret motive of this whim. But he is mis-
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EMILE
taken. The disgust he causes comes from nature as much as do the desires he would
like to arouse. He is also mistaken in his foolish expectations; this same nature
is careful to claim its rights: any girl who sells herself has already given
herself to someone else and, having given herself to the man of her choice, she has
made the comparison the old satyr fears. He therefore buys an imaginary pleasure
and is nonetheless abhorred.
As for me, for all that I may change when I am rich, there is one point on which I
shall never change. If neither morals nor virtue remain to me, at least there will
remain some taste, some sense, some delicacy. This will protect me from being the
dupe of my fortune, from using it to run after chimeras, from exhausting my purse
and my life in getting myself betrayed and ridiculed by children. If I were young,
I would seek the pleasures of youth; and wanting them in all their voluptuousness,
I would not seek them as a rich man. If I remained as I am now, that would be
another matter. I would prudently limit myself to the pleasures of my age. I would
indulge the tastes that I could enjoy, and I would stifle those which would no
longer be anything but my torture. I would not expose my gray beard to the mocking
disdain of young girls. I could not bear to see my disgusting caresses make them
sick to the stomach, to provide them with the most ridiculous stories at my
expense, or to imagine them describing the dirty pleasures of the old ape in such a
way as to avenge themselves for having endured them. And if unconquered habits had
turned my old desires into needs, I would perhaps satisfy them, but I would blush
with shame. I would remove the passion from the need; I would find as good a match
as was possible for me, and I would leave it at that. I would not make an
occupation of my weakness; and, above all, I would not want to have more than a
single witness to it. Human life has other pleasures when these are lacking; by
vainly running after those that flee, we also deprive ourselves of those that are
left to us. Let us change tastes with the years; let us not displace ages any more
than seasons. One must be oneself at all times and not battle against nature. Such
vain efforts use up life and prevent us from making good use of it.
The people hardly ever get bored. Their life is active. If their entertainments are
not varied, they are rare. Many days of fatigue make them taste a few days of
festival with delight. An alternation of long periods of labor and short periods of
leisure takes the place of seasoning in the pleasures of the people. For the rich,
boredom is their great plague. Amongst so many entertainments assembled at great
expense, in the midst of so many people joining together to please them, boredom
consumes them and kills them. They pass their lives in fleeing it and in being
overtaken by it. They are overwhelmed by its unbearable weight. Women who no longer
know how to occupy or entertain themselves are especially devoured by it, under the
name of vapors. For them boredom is transformed into a horrible illness which
sometimes deprives them of their reason and finally their lives. As for me, I know
of no fate more frightful than that of a pretty woman of Paris—except for that of
the agreeable little fellow who attaches himself to her and is also turned into an
idle woman, thus becoming doubly removed from
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BOOK IV
his station. The vanity of being a lady's man enables him to bear the length of the
gloomiest days that any human creature has ever spent.
The propriety, the fashions, and the customs which derive from luxury and high
style confine the course of life to the dullest uniformity. The pleasure one wants
to enjoy in others' eyes is lost for everyone; it is enjoyed neither by them nor by
oneself.* Ridicule, which opinion dreads above all else, is always at its side to
tyrannize it and to punish it. A person is never ridiculous except when he follows
fixed pjfactiees, He who knows how to vary his situations and his pleasures effaces
today -— the impression he made the day before. He is nothing in men's minds, but
he enjoys himself, for he devotes himself entirely to each hour and to each thing
he does. This would be my only constant practice. In each situation I would be
occupied with no other, and I would take each day by itself as though it were
independent of the day before and the day after. Just as I would be one of the
people when I am among the people, I would be a rustic when I am in the country.
And when I spoke of agriculture, the peasants would not make fun of me. I would not
build myself a city in the country and set up the Tuileries at my doorstep deep in
the provinces. I would have a little rustic house—a white house with green shutters
—on the slope of some agreeable, well-shaded hill. Although a thatch roof would be
the best in every season, I would grandly prefer not gloomy slate but tile, because
it makes a cleaner and gayer impression than thatch and because that is how the
houses are roofed in my country—it would remind me a little of the happy time of my
youth. Instead of a courtyard, I would have a farmyard, and instead of a stable, a
shed full of cows, so that I would have the dairy products I like so much. For my
garden I would have a vegetable patch, and for my park, a pretty orchard similar to
the one which will be spoken about hereafter. The fruits would be freely available
to strollers and would neither be counted nor gathered by my gardener; my
avaricious magnificence would not display to the eyes stately espaliers which one
would hardly dare to touch. This petty prodigality would not be very costly,
because I would have chosen my haven in some distant province where one sees little
money and many commodities, and where abundance and poverty reign.
There I would gather a society that was select rather than large, composed of
friends who love pleasure and know something about it, and of women who are able to
leave their easy chairs and take part in pastoral games—women who will sometimes
take up, instead of the shuttle and cards, fishing lines, bird snares, the
haymaker's rake, and the harvester's basket. There all the fashions of the city
would be forgotten; and, becoming villagers in the village, we would surrender
ourselves to throngs of diverse entertainments; our only difficulty each evening
would be which entertainment to choose for the next day.
* Two women of the world, in order to give the impression of enjoying themselves
very much, make it a law for themselves never to go to bed before five in the
morning. Amidst the rigor of winter their servants spend the night in the street
waiting for them, at a loss about how to prevent themselves from freezing. One
evening or, to put it better, one morning, someone enters the apartment where these
two persons who have such a good time let the hours flow by without counting them.
He finds them entirely alone, each asleep in her easy chair.
[35l]
EMILE
Exercise and the active life would provide us with new digestions and new tastes.
All our meals would be feasts where abundance would please more than delicacy.
Gaiety, rustic labors, and frolicsome games are the premier chefs of the world, and
delicate ragouts are quite ridiculous to people who have been breathless since
sunrise. The serving would be neither orderly nor elegant. The dining room would be
everywhere—in the garden, in a boat, under a tree, or sometimes near a distant
spring, on the cool, green grass, beneath clumps of elder and hazel. A long
procession of merry guests would sing while carrying the preparations for the
feast. We would have the lawn for our table and chairs; the ledges of the fountain
would serve as our buffet table; and the dessert would hang from the trees. The
dishes would be served without order; appetite would dispense with ceremony. Each
of us, openly preferring himself to everyone else, would find it good that all the
others similarly preferred themselves to him. From this cordial and moderate
familiarity there would arise—without coarseness, without falseness, and without
constraint—a playful conflict a hundred times more charming than politeness and
more likely to bind together our hearts. There would be no importunate lackeys
spying on our conversation, whispering criticisms of our demeanor, counting our
helpings with a greedy eye, or enjoying themselves by making us wait for our drinks
and muttering about our taking too long at dinner. We would be our own valets in
order to be our own masters; each of us would be served by all the others; the time
would pass without being measured. The repast would be our repose and would last as
long as the heat of the day. If some peasant returning to work with his tools on
his shoulder passed near us, I would gladden his heart with some good talk and a
drink of good wine, which would make him bear his poverty more gaily; and I would
also have the pleasure of feeling deep in my vitals an emotion of sympathy,
secretly saying to myself, "I am still a man."
If some country celebration brought the inhabitants of the place together, my
companions and I would be among the first ones there. If some country marriages—
more blessed by heaven than city ones—took place in my neighborhood, it would be
known that I like joy, and I would be invited. I would bring these good people some
gifts as simple as they are, which would contribute to the celebration, and I would
find in exchange goods of an inestimable value, goods so little known to my equals—
frankness and true pleasure. I would sup gaily at the end of their long table. I
would join in the refrain of an old rustic song, and I would dance in their barn
more gladly than at the opera ball.
"Up to this point everything is marvelous," I will be told, "but what about the
hunt? Is one really in the country if one does not hunt?" I understand. I only
wanted a little farm, and I was wrong. I assume that I am rich; therefore I must
have exclusive pleasures, destructive pleasures. This is an entirely different
affair. I need lands, woods, guards, rents, seignorial honors, and, above all,
incense and holy water.
Very well. But this land will have neighbors jealous of their rights and desirous
of usurping those of others. Our guards will squabble, and so perhaps will their
masters. Now there are altercations, quarrels,
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BOOK IV
hatreds, lawsuits, at the very least. Already things are no longer very agreeable.
My vassals will not take pleasure in seeing their wheat ripped up by my hares and
their beans ripped up by my boars. Not daring to kill the enemy who destroys his
work, each will at least want to drive him from his field. After having spent the
day cultivating their lands, they will have to spend the night guarding them. They
will have watchdogs, drums, cornets, bells. With all this racket they will disturb
my sleep. In spite of myself, I shall think of the misery of these poor people and
will not be able to refrain from reproaching myself for it. If I had the honor of
being a prince, all this would hardly touch me. But as I would be a parvenu who had
recently become rich, I would still have a trace of a plebeian heart.
That is not all. The abundance of the game will tempt hunters. There will soon be
poachers whom I shall have to punish. I shall need prisons, jailers, armed guards,
galleys. All this appears rather cruel to me. The wives of these unfortunate men
will come to besiege my doors and to importune me with their cries, or they will
have to be driven away and maltreated. Those among the poor who have not poached
and whose harvest has been foraged by my game will also come to complain. The
former group will be punished for having killed the game, and the latter ruined for
having spared it. What a sad choice! I shall see only examples of misery on all
sides; I shall hear only groans. It seems to me that this ought greatly to disturb
the pleasure of massacring at one's ease—practically under one's feet—throngs of
partridges and hares.
Do you wish to disengage the pleasures from their pains? Then remove exclusiveness
from the pleasures. The more you leave them to men in common, the more you will
always taste them pure. Therefore I shall not do all that I just said; but, without
changing tastes, I shall at less expense pursue the taste I am here supposing is
mine. I shall establish my country abode in a spot where the hunt is open to
everyone, and where I can have the entertainment without the bother. The game will
be rarer, but there will be more skill in seeking it and more pleasure in shooting
it. I remember the heartthrobs that my father experienced at the flight of the
first partridge, and the transports of joy with which he found the hare he had
sought all day. Yes, I maintain that my father, alone with his dog and burdened
with his rifle, his game bag, his kit, and his little prey, returned in the evening
—exhausted and ripped by brambles—more satisfied by his day than all your ladies'
men passing as hunters who, riding a good horse and followed by twenty loaded
rifles, do nothing but change rifles, shoot, and kill things around them without
art, without glory, and almost without exercise. The pleasure is not any less,
then, and the inconvenience is removed when one has neither land to guard nor
poachers to punish nor unfortunate people to torment. Here, then, is a solid reason
for preference. No matter what the situation, one does not torment men endlessly
without also receiving some discomfort from it; and the continued maledictions of
the people sooner or later make the game bitter.
[353]
EMILE
Yet another point. Exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure. True
entertainments are those one shares with the people. Those one wants to have for
oneself alone, one no longer has at all. If the walls I raise around my park make
it a gloomy cloister for me, I have at great expense done nothing but deprive
myself of the pleasure of walking. Now I am forced to go far away to seek it. The
demon of property infects everything it touches. A rich man wants to be the master
everywhere and is only well off where he is not the master; he is always forced to
flee from himself. As for me, when I am rich, I shall act in this respect just as I
did when I was poor. I am richer now with the property of others than I shall ever
be with my own—I lay hold of all that suits me in my vicinity. There is no
conqueror more determined than I am. I usurp even from princes. I make myself at
home on any open pieces of land that please me. I give them names. I make one my
park, another my terrace, and so I am their master. From then on, I walk about on
them with impunity. I return often to maintain possession. By dint of walking on
them, I use their soil as much as I want; and I shall never be persuaded that the
man who holds the title to the property I appropriate draws more use from the money
it yields for him than I draw from his land. And if they come to vex me with
ditches and hedges, it matters little to me. I take my park on my shoulders, and I
go to set it down elsewhere. Sites are not lacking in the vicinity, and I shall be
pillaging my neighbors for a long time before I lack a haven.
This is a kind of essay on true taste in the choice of agreeable leisure. This is
the spirit in which a person enjoys himself. All the rest is only illusion,
chimera, foolish vanity. Whoever deviates from these rules, however rich he may be,
will find that his gold will buy him nothing but manure and will never know the
value of life.
Someone will doubtless object that such entertainments are within the reach of all
men and that one does not need to be rich to enjoy them. This is precisely what I
wanted to get at. One has pleasure when one wants to have it. It is only opinion
that makes everything difficult and drives happiness away from us. It is a hundred
times easier to be happy than to appear to be happy. The man who has taste and is
truly voluptuous has nothing to do with riches. It suffices for him to be free and
master of himself. Whoever enjoys health and does not lack the necessities is rich
enough if he roots the goods of opinion out of his heart. It is Horace's aurea
mediocritas.'■''■' So, you men with strongboxes, seek some other use for your
opulence, since it is good for nothing so far as pleasure is concerned. Emile will
not know all this better than I do, but since he has a purer and healthier heart,
he will feel it even more keenly, and all his observations in society will only
confirm it for him.
While thus passing the time, we are still in search of Sophie, and we do not find
her. It was important that she not be found so quickly, and we have looked for her
where I was quite sure she was not to be found.*
Finally, the moment has come. It is time to seek her in earnest, lest he find
someone on his own whom he takes for her and not learn
* Mulierum fortem quis invenief? Procul, et de ultimis finibus pretium eius.
Proverbs 31: io.1"
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BOOK IV
his error until it is too late. Adieu, then, Paris, celebrated city, city of noise,
smoke, and mud, where the women no longer believe in honor and the men no longer
believe in virtue. Adieu, Paris. We are seeking love, happiness, innocence. We
shall never be far enough away from you.
End of the Fourth Book
Or
4*
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BOOK V
N
-A- ™OW we have come to the last act in the drama of youth, but
we are not yet at the denouement. It is not good for man to be alone.' Emile is a
man. We have promised him a companion. She has to be given to him. That companion
is Sophie. In what place is her abode? Where shall we find her? To find her, it is
necessary to know her. Let us first learn what she is; then we shall better judge
what places she inhabits. And even when we have found her, everything will still
not have been done. "Since our young gentleman," says Locke, "is ready to marry, it
is time to leave him to his beloved."2 And with that he finishes his work. But as I
do not have the honor of raising a gentleman, I shall take care not to imitate
Locke on this point.
Sophie
OR THE WOMAN
Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man—that is to say, she ought to have
everything which suits the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill
her place in the physical and moral order. Let us begin, then, by examining the
similarities and the differences of her sex and ours.
In everything not connected with sex, woman is man. She has the same organs, the
same needs, the same faculties. The machine is constructed in the same way; its
parts are the same; the one functions as does the other; the form is similar; and
in whatever respect one considers them, the difference between them is only one of
more or less.
In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related and in
every respect different. The difficulty of comparing them comes from the difficulty
of determining what in their constitutions is due to sex and what is not. On the
basis of comparative anatomy
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and even just by inspection, one finds general differences between them that do not
appear connected with sex. They are, nevertheless, connected with sex, but by
relations which we are not in a position to perceive. We do not know the extent of
these relations. The only thing we know with certainty is that everything man and
woman have in common belongs to the species, and that everything which
distinguishes them belongs to the sex. From this double perspective, we find them
related in so many ways and opposed in so many other ways that it is perhaps one of
the marvels of nature to have been able to construct two such similar beings who
are constituted so differently.
These relations and these differences must have a moral influence. This conclusion
is evident to the senses; it is in agreement with our experience; and it shows how
vain are the disputes as to whether one of the two sexes is superior or whether
they are equal—as though each, in fulfilling nature's ends according to its own
particular purpose, were thereby less perfect than if it resembled the other more!
In what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not
comparable. A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in
mind any more than in looks, and perfection is not susceptible of more or less.
In the union of the sexes each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in
the same way. From this diversity arises the first assignable difference in the
moral relations of the two sexes. One ought to be active and strong, the other
passive and weak. One must necessarily will and be able; it suffices that the other
put up little resistance.
Once this principle is established, it follows that woman is made specially to
please man. If man ought to please her in turn, it is due to a less direct
necessity. His merit is in his power; he pleases by the sole fact of his strength.
This is not the law of love, I agree. But it is that of nature, prior to love
itself.
If woman is made to please and to be subjugated, she ought to make herself
agreeable to man instead of arousing him. Her own violence is in her charms. It is
by these that she ought to constrain him to find his strength and make use of it.
The surest art for animating that strength is to make it necessary by resistance.
Then amour-propre unites with desire, and the one triumphs in the victory that the
other has made him win. From this there arises attack and defense, the audacity of
one sex and the timidity of the other, and finally the modesty and the shame with
which nature armed the weak in order to enslave the strong.
Who could think that nature has indiscriminately prescribed the same advances to
both men and women, and that the first to form desires should also be the first to
show them? What a strange depravity of judgment! Since the undertaking has such
different consequences for the two sexes, is it natural that they should have the
same audacity in abandoning themselves to it? With so great an inequality in what
each risks in the union, how can one fail to see that if reserve did not impose on
one sex the moderation which nature imposes on the other, the result would soon be
the ruin of both, and mankind would perish
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by the means established for preserving it? If there were some unfortunate region
on earth where philosophy had introduced this practice —especially in hot
countries, where more women are born than men— men would be tyrannized by women.
For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses and reawaken in the depths
of their hearts the remains of ardors which are almost extinguished, men would
finally be their victims and would see themselves dragged to death without ever
being able to defend themselves.
If females among the animals do not have the same shame, what follows from that? Do
they have, as women do, the unlimited desires to which this shame serves as a
brake? For them, desires comes only with need. When the need is satisfied, the
desire ceases. They no longer feign to repulse the male * but really do so. They do
exactly the opposite of Augustus' daughter; they accept no more passengers when the
ship has its cargo.:i Even when they are free, their times of good will are short
and quickly pass. Instinct impels them, and instinct stops them. What will be the
substitute for this negative instinct when you have deprived women of modesty? To
wait until they no longer care for men is equivalent to waiting until they are no
longer good for anything.
The Supreme Being wanted to do honor to the human species in everything. While
giving man inclinations without limit, He gives him at the same time the law which
regulates them, in order that he may be free and in command of himself. While
abandoning man to immoderate passions, He joins reason to these passions in order
to govern them. While abandoning woman to unlimited desires, He joins modesty to
these desires in order to constrain them. In addition, He adds yet another real
recompense for the good use of one's faculties—the taste we acquire for decent
things when we make them the rule of our actions. All this, it seems to me, is
worth more than the instinct of beasts.
Whether the human female shares man's desires or not and wants to satisfy them or
not, she repulses him and always defends herself— but not always with the same
force or, consequently, with the same success. For the attacker to be victorious,
the one who is attacked must permit or arrange it; for does she not have adroit
means to force the aggressor to use force? The freest and sweetest of all acts does
not admit of real violence. Nature and reason oppose it: nature, in that it has
provided the weaker with as much strength as is needed to resist when it pleases
her; reason, in that real rape is not only the most brutal of all acts but the one
most contrary to its end—either because the man thus declares war on his companion
and authorizes her to defend her person and her liberty even at the expense of the
agressor's life, or because the woman alone is the judge of the condition she is
in, and a child would have no father if every man could usurp the father's rights.
Here, then, is a third conclusion drawn from the constitution of the
* I have already noticed that affected and provocative refusals are common to
almost all females, even among animals, even when they are most disposed to give
themselves. One has to have never observed their wiles not to agree with this.
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sexes—that the stronger appears to be master but actually depends on the weaker.
This is due not to a frivolous practice of gallantry or to the proud generosity of
a protector, but to an invariable law of nature which gives woman more facility to
excite the desires than man to satisfy them. This causes the latter, whether he
likes it or not, to depend on the former's wish and constrains him to seek to
please her in turn, so that she will consent to let him be the stronger. Then what
is sweetest for man in his victory is the doubt whether it is weakness which yields
to strength or the will which surrenders. And the woman's usual ruse is always to
leave this doubt between her and him. In this the spirit of women corresponds
perfectly to their constitution. Far from blushing at their weakness, they make it
their glory. Their tender muscles are without resistance. They pretend to be unable
to lift the lightest burdens. They would be ashamed to be strong. Why is that? It
is not only to appear delicate; it is due to a shrewder precaution. They prepare in
advance excuses and the right to be weak in case of need.
The progress of the enlightenment acquired as a result of our vices has greatly
changed the old opinions on this point among us. Rapes are hardly ever spoken of
anymore, since they are so little necessary and men no longer believe in them.* By
contrast, they are very common in early Greek and Jewish antiquity, because those
old opinions belong to the simplicity of nature, and only the experience of
libertinism has been able to uproot them. If fewer acts of rape are cited in our
day, this is surely not because men are more temperate but because they are less
credulous, and such a complaint, which previously would have persuaded simple
peoples, in our days would succeed only in attracting the laughter of mockers. It
is more advantageous to keep quiet. In Deuteronomy there is a law by which a girl
who had been abused was punished along with her seducer if the offense had been
committed in the city. But if it had been committed in the country or in an
isolated place, the man alone was punished: "For," the law says, "the girl cried
out and was not heard."4 This benign interpretation taught the girls not to let
themselves be surprised in well-frequented places.
The effect of these differences of opinion about morals is evident. Modern
gallantry is their work. Finding that their pleasures depended more on the will of
the fair sex than they had believed, men have captivated that will by attentions
for which the fair sex has amply compensated them.
Observe how the physical leads us unawares to the moral, and how the sweetest laws
of love are born little by little from the coarse union of the sexes. Women possess
their empire not because men wanted it that way, but because nature wants it that
way. It belonged to women before they appeared to have it. The same Hercules who
believed he raped the fifty daughters of Thespitius was nevertheless constrained
* There can be such a disproportion of age and strength that real rape takes place;
but treating here the relation between the sexes according to the order of nature,
I take them both as they ordinarily are in that relation.
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to weave while he was with Omphale; and the strong Samson was not so strong as
Delilah.5 This empire belongs to women and cannot be taken from them, even when
they abuse it. If they could ever lose it, they would have done so long ago.
There is no parity between the two sexes in regard to the consequences of sex. The
male is male only at certain moments. The female is female her whole life or at
least during her whole youth. Everything constantly recalls her sex to her; and, to
fulfill its functions well, she needs a constitution which corresponds to it. She
needs care during her pregnancy; she needs rest at the time of childbirth; she
needs a soft and sedentary life to suckle her children; she needs patience and
gentleness, a zeal and an affection that nothing can rebuff in order to raise her
children. She serves as the link between them and their father; she alone makes him
love them and gives him the confidence to call them his own. How much tenderness
and care is required to maintain the union of the whole family! And, finally, all
this must come not from virtues but from tastes, or else the human species would
soon be extinguished.
The strictness of the relative duties of the two sexes is not and cannot be the
same. When woman complains on this score about unjust man-made inequality, she is
wrong. This inequality is not a human institution—or, at least, it is the work not
of prejudice but of reason. It is up to the sex that nature has charged with the
bearing of children to be responsible for them to the other sex. Doubtless it is
not permitted to anyone to violate his faith, and every unfaithful husband who
deprives his wife of the only reward of the austere duties of her sex is an unjust
and barbarous man. But the unfaithful woman does more; she dissolves the family and
breaks all the bonds of nature. In giving the man children which are not his, she
betrays both. She joins perfidy to infidelity. I have difficulty seeing what
disorders and what crimes do not flow from this one. If there is a frightful
condition in the world, it is that of an unhappy father who, lacking confidence in
his wife, does not dare to yield to the sweetest sentiments of his heart, who
wonders, in embracing his child, whether he is embracing another's, the token of
his dishonor, the plunderer of his own children's property. What does the family
become in such a situation if not a society of secret enemies whom a guilty woman
arms against one another in forcing them to feign mutual love?
It is important, then, not only that a woman be faithful, but that she be judged to
be faithful by her husband, by those near her, by everyone. It is important that
she be modest, attentive, reserved, and that she give evidence of her virtue to the
eyes of others as well as to her own conscience. If it is important that a father
love his children, it is important that he esteem their mother. These are the
reasons which put even appearances among the duties of women, and make honor and
reputation no less indispensable to them than chastity. There follows from these
principles, along with the moral difference of the sexes, a new motive of duty and
propriety which prescribes especially to women the most scrupulous attention to
their conduct, their manners, and
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their bearing. To maintain vaguely that the two sexes are equal and that their
duties are the same, is to lose oneself in vain declaiming; it is to say nothing so
long as one does not respond to these considerations.
Is it not a sound way of reasoning to present exceptions in response to such well-
grounded general laws? Women, you say, do not always produce children? No, but
their proper purpose is to produce them. What! Because there are a hundred big
cities in the universe where women living in license produce few children, you
claim that it is proper to woman's status to produce few children! And what would
become of your cities if women living more simply and more chastely far away in the
country did not make up for the sterility of the city ladies? In how many provinces
are women who have only produced four or five children taken to be infecund! *
Finally, what does it matter that this or that woman produces few children? Is
woman's status any less that of motherhood, and is it not by general laws that
nature and morals ought to provide for this status?
Even if there were intervals as long as one supposes between pregnancies, will a
woman abruptly and regularly change her way of life without peril and risk? Will
she be nurse today and warrior tomorrow? Will she change temperament and tastes as
a chameleon does colors? Will she suddenly go from shade, enclosure, and domestic
cares to the harshness of the open air, the labors, the fatigues, and the perils of
war? Will she be fearful t at one moment and brave at another, delicate at one
moment and robust at another? If young people raised in Paris have difficulty
enduring the profession of arms, will women, who have never endured the sun and
hardly know how to walk, endure it after fifty years of softness? Will they take up
this harsh profession at the age when men leave it?
There are countries where women give birth almost without pain and nurse their
children almost without effort. I admit it. But in these same countries the men go
half naked at all times, vanquish ferocious beasts, carry a canoe like a knapsack,
pursue the hunt for up to seven or eight hundred leagues, sleep in the open air on
the ground, bear unbelievable fatigues, and go several days without eating. When
women become robust, men become still more so. When men get soft, women get even
softer. When the two change equally, the difference remains the same.
In his Republic, Plato gives women the same exercises as men.8 I can well believe
it! Having removed private families from his regime and no longer knowing what to
do with women, he found himself forced to make them men. That noble genius had
planned everything, foreseen everything. He was forestalling an objection that
perhaps no one would have thought of making to him, but he provided a poor solution
to the one which is made to him. I am not speaking of that alleged
* Without that, the species would necessarily fade away. In order for it to be
preserved, every woman must, everything considered, produce nearly four children;
for nearly half of the children who are born die before they can have others, and
the two remaining ones are needed to represent the father and the mother. See if
the cities will provide you with this population.
t The timidity of women is another instinct of nature against the double risk they
run during their pregnancy.
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community of women; the often repeated reproach on this point proves that those who
make it against him have never read him. I am speaking of that civil promiscuity
which throughout confounds the two sexes in the same employments and in the same
labors and which cannot fail to engender the most intolerable abuses. I speak of
that subversion of the sweetest sentiments of nature, sacrificed to an artificial
sentiment which can only be maintained by them—as though there were no need for a
natural base on which to form conventional ties; as though the love of one's
nearest were not the principle of the love one owes the state; as though it were
not by means of the small fatherland which is the family that the heart attaches
itself to the large one; as though it were not the good son, the good husband, and
the good father who make the good citizen!
Once it is demonstrated that man and woman are not and ought not to be constituted
in the same way in either character or temperament, it follows that they ought not
to have the same education. In following nature's directions, man and woman ought
to act in concert, but they ought not to do the same things. The goal of their
labors is common, but their labors themselves are different, and consequently so
are the tastes directing them. After having tried to form the natural man, let us
also see how the woman who suits this man ought to be formed so that our work will
not be left imperfect.
Do you wish always to be well guided? Then always follow nature's indications.
Everything that characterizes the fair sex ought to be respected as established by
nature. You constantly say, "Women have this or that failing which we do not have."
Your pride deceives you. They would be failings for you; they are their good
qualities. Everything would go less well if they did not have these qualities.
Prevent these alleged failings from degenerating, but take care not to destroy
them.
For their part, women do not cease to proclaim that we raise them to be vain and
coquettish, that we constantly entertain them with puerilities in order to remain
more easily their masters. They blame on us the failings for which we reproach
them. What folly! And since when is it that men get involved in the education of
girls? Who prevents their mothers from raising them as they please? They have no
colleges. What a great misfortune! Would God that there were none for boys; they
would be more sensibly and decently raised! Are your daughters forced to waste
their time in silliness? Are they made in spite of themselves to spend half their
lives getting dressed up, following the example you set them? Are you prevented
from instructing them and having them instructed as you please? Is it our fault
that they please us when they are pretty, that their mincing ways seduce us, that
the art which they learn from you attracts us and pleases us, that we like to see
them tastefully dressed, that we let them sharpen at their leisure the weapons with
which they subjugate us? So, decide to raise them like men. The men will gladly
consent to it! The more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern
them, and then men will truly be the masters.
All the faculties common to the two sexes are not equally distributed between them;
but taken together, they balance out. Woman is worth
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more as woman and less as man. Wherever she makes use of her rights, she has the
advantage. Wherever she wants to usurp ours, she remains beneath us. One can
respond to this general truth only with exceptions, the constant mode of argument
of the gallant partisans of the fair sex.
To cultivate man's qualities in women and to neglect those which are proper to them
is obviously to work to their detriment. Crafty women see this too well to be duped
by it. In trying to usurp our advantages, they do not abandon theirs. But it turns
out that they are unable to manage both well—because the two are incompatible—and
they remain beneath their own level without getting up to ours, thus losing half
their value. Believe me, judicious mother, do not make a decent man of your
daughter, as though you would give nature the lie.7 Make a decent woman of her, and
be sure that as a result she will be worth more for herself and for us.
Does it follow that she ought to be raised in ignorance of everything and limited
to the housekeeping functions alone? Will man turn his companion into his servant?
Will he deprive himself of the greatest charm of society with her? In order to make
her more subject, will he prevent her from feeling anything, from knowing anything?
Will he make her into a veritable automaton? Surely not. It is not thus that nature
has spoken in giving women such agreeable and nimble minds. On the contrary, nature
wants them to think, to judge, to love, to know, to cultivate their minds as well
as their looks. These are the weapons nature gives them to take the place of the
strength they lack and to direct ours. They ought to learn many things but only
those that are suitable for them to know.
Whether I consider the particular purpose of the fair sex, whether I observe its
inclinations, whether I consider its duties, all join equally in indicating to me
the form of education that suits it. Woman and man are made for one another, but
their mutual dependence is not equal. Men depend on women because of their desires;
women depend on men because of both their desires and their needs. We would survive
more easily without them than they would without us. For them to have what is
necessary to their station, they depend on us to give it to them, to want to give
it to them, to esteem them worthy of it. They depend on our sentiments, on the
value we set on their merit, on the importance we attach to their charms and their
virtues. By the very law of nature women are at the mercy of men's judgments, as
much for their own sake as for that of their children. It is not enough that they
be estimable; they must be esteemed. It is not enough for them to be pretty; they
must please. It is not enough for them to be temperate; they must be recognized as
such. Their honor is not only in their conduct but in their reputation; and it is
not possible that a woman who consents to be regarded as disreputable can ever be
decent. When a man acts well, he depends only on himself and can brave public
judgment; but when a woman acts well, she has accomplished only half of her task,
and what is thought of her is no less important to her than what she actually is.
From this it follows that the system of woman's education ought to be contrary in
this respect to the system
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of our education. Opinion is the grave of virtue among men and its throne among
women.
The good constitution of children initially depends on that of their mothers. The
first education of men depends on the care of women. Men's morals, their passions,
their tastes, their pleasures, their very happiness also depend on women. Thus the
whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to
them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care
for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives
agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to
be taught from childhood. So long as one does not return to this principle, one
will deviate from the goal, and all the precepts taught to women will be of no use
for their happiness or for ours.
But although every woman wants to please men and should want to, there is quite a
difference between wanting to please the man of merit, the truly lovable man, and
wanting to please those little flatterers who dishonor both their own sex and the
one they imitate. Neither nature nor reason can bring a woman to love in men what
resembles herself; nor is it by adopting their ways that she ought to seek to make
herself loved.
When women leave the modest and composed tone of their sex and adopt the airs of
these giddy fellows, far from following their own vocation, they renounce it and
divest themselves of the rights they think they are usurping. "If we acted
differently," they say, "we would not please men." They lie. One has to be foolish
to love fools. The desire to attract these people reveals the taste of the woman
who indulges it. If there were no frivolous men, she would be eager to produce
some; and she is much more responsible for their frivolities than they are for
hers. The woman who loves true men and who wants to please them employs means
appropriate to her intention. To be a woman means to be coquettish, but her
coquetry changes its form and its object according to her views. Let us regulate
her views according to those of nature, and woman will have the education which
suits her.
Little girls love adornment almost from birth. Not satisfied with being pretty,
they want people to think that they are pretty. One sees in their little airs that
this concern preoccupies them already; and when they are hardly in a condition to
understand what is said to them, they can already be governed by speaking to them
of what will be thought of them. When the same motive is—very inappropriately—
suggested to little boys, it by no means has a similar empire over them. Provided
that they are independent and that they have pleasure, they care little what might
be thought of them. It is only by dint of time and effort that they are subjected
to the same law.
From whatever source this first lesson comes to girls, it is a very good one. Since
the body is born, so to speak, before the soul, the body ought to be cultivated
first. This order is common to the two sexes, but the aim of this cultivation is
different. For man this aim is the development of strength; for woman it is the
development of attractiveness. Not that these qualities ought to exclude one
another; their rank order
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is merely reversed in each sex: women need enough strength to do everything they do
with grace; men need enough adroitness to do everything they do with facility.
Extreme softness on the part of women leads to softness in men. Women ought not to
be robust like men, but they should be robust for men, so that the men born from
them will be robust too. In this respect convents, where the boarders have coarse
food but many sports, races, and games outdoors in gardens, are to be preferred to
the paternal household, where a girl—delicately fed, always pampered or scolded,
always seated within range of her mother's eyes, shut up in a room— does not dare
stand up, walk, speak, or breathe, and does not have a moment of freedom to play,
jump, run, shout, or indulge in the petulance natural to her age. It is always a
case of either dangerous slackness or ill-conceived severity—never anything
according to reason. This is how the body and the heart of youth are ruined.
The girls of Sparta exercised in military games like the boys—not to go to war but
one day to bear children capable of withstanding war's fatigues.8 That is not what
I recommend. It is not necessary for mothers to have carried the musket and done
the Prussian drill in order for them to provide soldiers to the state. But I do
find that in general this part of Greek education was very well conceived. The
young girls appeared often in public, not mixed in with the boys but gathered
together among themselves. There was hardly a festival, a sacrifice, or a ceremony
where groups of daughters of the first citizens were not seen crowned with flowers,
chanting hymns, forming dancing companies, bearing baskets, vases, and offerings,
and presenting to the depraved senses of the Greeks a charming spectacle fit to
counterbalance the bad effect of their indecent gymnastic. Whatever impression this
practice made on men's hearts, it was still an excellent way of giving the fair sex
a good constitution in youth by means of agreeable, moderate, and salutary
exercises. It sharpened and formed the girls' taste by means of the continual
desire to please and did so without ever endangering their morals.
As soon as these young persons were married, they were no longer seen in public.
Shut up in their houses, they limited all their cares to their households and their
families. Such is the way of life that nature and reason prescribe for the fair
sex. From these mothers were born the healthiest, the most robust, the most well-
built men in the world. And in spite of the ill repute of some islands, it is an
unchanging fact that of all the peoples of the world—without excepting even the
Romans— none is cited where the women were both purer and more lovable, and where
they better combined morals with beauty than in ancient Greece.
It is known that comfortable clothing which did not hinder the body contributed a
great deal to leaving both sexes among the Greeks with those beautiful proportions
seen in their statues—statues which still serve as models for art today, when
disfigured nature has ceased furnishing art with models among us. They had not a
single one of all these gothic shackles, these multitudes of ligatures which
squeeze our bodies on all sides. Their women were ignorant of the use of these
whalebone corsets with which our women counterfeit their waists
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rather than display them. I cannot believe that this abuse, pushed to an
inconceivable extent in England, will not finally cause the species to degenerate,
and I even maintain that the attraction that it offers is in bad taste. It is not
attractive to see a woman cut in half like a wasp. That is shocking to the sight,
and it makes the imagination suffer. The narrowness of the waist has, like
everything else, its proportions, its limit, beyond which it is certainly a defect.
This defect would even be an assault on the eye when seen naked. Why should it be a
beautiful thing under clothing?
I dare not pursue the reasons why women are obstinate about thus putting themselves
in armor: a drooping bosom, a fat stomach, etc. This is most displeasing, I agree,
in a twenty-year-old, but it is no longer shocking at thirty. And since we must, in
spite of ourselves, at all times be what nature pleases, and since man's eye is not
deceived, these defects are less displeasing at all ages than the foolish
affectation of a little girl of forty.
Everything that hinders and constrains nature is in bad taste. This is as true of
the adornments of the body as it is of the ornaments of the mind. Life, health,
reason, and well-being ought to go ahead of everything. Grace does not exist
without comfort. Delicacy is not sickliness, and it is not requisite to be
unhealthy in order to please. One arouses pity when one suffers, but pleasure and
desire seek the freshness of health.
The children of both sexes have many common entertainments, and that ought to be
so. Is this not also the case when they are grown up? They also have particular
tastes which distinguish them. Boys seek movement and noise: drums, boots, little
carriages. Girls prefer what presents itself to sight and is useful for
ornamentation: mirrors, jewels, dresses, particularly dolls. The doll is the
special entertainment of this sex. This is evidently its taste, determined by its
purpose. The physical part of the art of pleasing lies in adornment. This is the
only part of that art that children can cultivate.
Observe a little girl spending the day around her doll, constantly changing its
clothes, dressing and undressing it hundreds and hundreds of times, continuously
seeking new combinations of ornaments—well-or ill-matched, it makes no difference.
Her fingers lack adroitness, her taste is not yet formed, but already the
inclination reveals itself. In this eternal occupation time flows without her
thinking of it; the hours pass, and she knows nothing of it. She even forgets
meals. She is hungrier for adornment than for food. But, you will say, she adorns
her doll and not her person. Doubtless. She sees her doll and does not see herself.
She can do nothing for herself. She is not yet formed; she has neither talent nor
strength; she is still nothing. She is entirely in her doll, and she puts all her
coquetry into it. She will not always leave it there. She awaits the moment when
she will be her own doll.
This is a very definite primary taste. You have only to follow and regulate it. It
is certain that the little girl would Want with all her heart to know how to adorn
her doll, to make its bracelets, its scarf, its flounce, its lace. For all of this
she is put in such a harsh dependence on the good will of others that it would be
far more convenient for
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her to owe everything to her own industry. In this way there emerges the reason for
the first lessons she is given. They are not tasks prescribed to her, they are
kindnesses done for her. In fact, almost all little girls learn to read and write
with repugnance. But as for holding a needle, that they always learn gladly. They
imagine themselves to be grown up and think with pleasure that these talents will
one day be useful for adorning themselves.
Once this first path is opened, it is easy to follow. Sewing, embroidery, and
lacemaking come by themselves. Tapestry is not so much to their taste. Furniture is
too far from them: it is not connected to the person; it is connected with other
sets of opinions. Tapestry is the entertainment of women; young girls will never
take a very great pleasure in it.
This voluntary progress is easily extended to drawing, for this art is not without
importance for the art of dressing oneself up tastefully. But I would not want them
to apply themselves to landscapes, still less to figures. Leaves, fruits, flowers,
draperies, everything which is useful for giving an elegant turn to clothing and
for making an embroidery pattern for oneself when one does not find any to one's
taste—that is enough for them. In general, if it is important for men to limit
their studies to useful knowledge, it is even more important for women, because the
latter's lives, although less laborious, are—or ought to be— more attached to their
cares and more interrupted by various cares. Thus their lives do not permit them to
indulge themselves in any preferred talent to the prejudice of their duties.
Whatever humorists may say, good sense belongs equally to the two sexes. Girls are
generally more docile than boys, and one should even use more authority with them,
as I shall say a little later. But it does not follow that anything ought to be
demanded from them whose utility they cannot see. The art of mothers is to show
them the utility of everything they prescribe to them, and that is all the easier
since intelligence is more precocious in girls than in boys. This rule banishes —
for their sex as well as for ours—not only idle studies which lead to no good and
do not even make those who have pursued them more attractive to others, but even
those which are not useful at their age and whose usefulness for a more advanced
age the child cannot foresee. If I do not want to push a boy to learn to read, a
fortiori I do not want to force girls to before making them well aware of what the
use of reading is. In the way this utility is ordinarily showed to them, we follow
our own idea far more than theirs. After all, where is the necessity for a girl to
know how to read and write so early? Will she so soon have a household to govern?
There are very few girls who do not abuse this fatal science more than they make
good use of it. And all of them have too much curiosity not to learn it—without our
forcing them to do so—when they have the leisure and the occasion. Perhaps they
ought to learn to do arithmetic before anything, for nothing presents a more
palpable utility at all times, requires longer practice, and is so exposed to error
as calculation. If the little girl were to get cherries for her snack only by doing
an arithmetical operation, I assure you that she would soon know how to calculate.
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BOOK V
I know a young person who learned to write before learning to read, and who began
to write with the needle before writing with the quill. Of all the letters, she
first wanted only to make O's. She incessantly made big and little O's, O's of all
sizes, O's inside one another, and always drawn backward. Unfortunately, one day
when she was busy with this useful exercise, she saw herself in a mirror; and
finding that this constrained attitude was not graceful for her, like another
Minerva 9 she threw away the pen and no longer wanted to make O's. Her brother did
not like to write any more than she did, but what irritated him was the discomfort
and not the appearance it gave him. Another tack was taken to bring her back to
writing. The little girl was refined and vain. She did not stand for her linen
being used by her sisters. Others marked it for her; they no longer wanted to mark
it. She had to learn how to mark it herself. The rest of her progress can easily be
conceived.
Always justify the cares that you impose on young girls, but always impose cares on
them. Idleness and disobedience are the two most dangerous defects for them and the
ones least easily cured once contracted. Girls ought to be vigilant and
industrious. That is not all. They ought to be constrained very early. This
misfortune, if it is one for them, is inseparable from their sex, and they are
never delivered from it without suffering far more cruel misfortunes. All their
lives they will be enslaved to the most continual and most severe of constraints—
that of the proprieties. They must first be exercised in constraint, so that it
never costs them anything to tame all their caprices in order to submit them to the
wills of others. If they always wanted to work, one would sometimes have to force
them to do nothing. Dissipation, frivolity, and inconstancy are defects that easily
arise from the corruption and continued indulgence of their first tastes. To
prevent this abuse, teach them above all to conquer themselves. Amidst our
senseless arrangements a decent woman's life is a perpetual combat against herself.
It is just that this sex share the pain of the evils it has caused us.
Prevent girls from being bored by their work and enthusiastic about their
entertainment, as is always the case in vulgar educations where, as Fenelon says,
all the boredom is put on one side and all the pleasure on the other.10 If one
follows the preceding rules, the first of these two difficulties will arise only
when the persons with them are displeasing to them. A little girl who loves her
mother or her lady friend will work at her side all day without boredom. Chatter
alone will compensate her for all her constraint. But if she finds the woman who
governs her unbearable, she will develop the same distaste for everything she does
under that woman's eyes. It is very difficult for girls who do not enjoy themselves
more with their mothers than with anyone else in the world to turn out well one
day. But to judge their true sentiments, one must study them and not trust what
they say, for they are flatterers and dissimulators, and they quickly learn to
disguise themselves. Neither ought one to prescribe that they love their mother.
Affection does not come from duty, and constraint is of no use here. Attachment,
care, and mere habit make the mother loved by her daughter, if she does nothing to
make herself hated. Even the constraint in which she keeps her daughter, if it is
well directed, will, far from
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weakening this attachment, only increase it; for dependence is a condition natural
to women, and thus girls feel themselves made to obey.
For the same reason that they have—or ought to have—little freedom, they tend to
excess in the freedom that is left to them. Extreme in everything, they indulge
themselves in their games with even more intensity than boys do. This is the second
difficulty of which I was just speaking. This intensity ought to be moderated, for
it is the cause of several vices peculiar to women, such as, among others, the
capri-ciousness and infatuation which cause a woman to be in transports today for
some object she will not look at tomorrow. Inconstancy of tastes is as deadly for
them as is excess, and both come from the same source. Do not deprive them of
gaiety, laughter, noise, and frolicsome games, but prevent them from getting their
fill of one in order to run to another; do not allow for a single instant in their
lives that they no longer know any restraint. Accustom them to being interrupted in
the midst of their games and brought back to other cares without grumbling. Habit
alone suffices in this as well, because it does nothing other than to reinforce
nature.
From this habitual constraint comes a docility which women need all their lives,
since they never cease to be subjected either to a man or to the judgments of men
and they are never permitted to put themselves above these judgments. The first and
most important quality of a woman is gentleness. As she is made to obey a being who
is so imperfect, often so full of vices, and always so full of defects as man, she
ought to learn early to endure even injustice and to bear a husband's wrongs
without complaining. It is not for his sake, it is for her own, that she ought to
be gentle. The bitterness and the stubbornness of women never do anything but
increase their ills and the bad behavior of their husbands. Men feel that it is not
with these weapons that women ought to conquer them. Heaven did not make women
ingratiating and persuasive in order that they become shrewish. It did not make
them weak in order that they be imperious. It did not give them so gentle a voice
in order that they utter insults. It did not give them such delicate features to be
disfigured by anger. When they get upset, they forget themselves. They are often
right to complain, but they are always wrong to scold. Each sex ought to keep to
its own tone. A husband who is too gentle can make a woman impertinent; but unless
a man is a monster, the gentleness of a woman brings him around and triumphs over
him sooner or later.
Let girls always be subjected, but let mothers not always be inexorable. To make a
young person docile, one must not make her unhappy; to make her modest, one must
not brutalize her. On the contrary, I would not be upset if she were allowed to use
a little cleverness, not to elude punishment for disobedience but to get herself
exempted from obeying. It is not a question of making her dependence painful for
her; it suffices to make her feel it. Guile is a natural talent with the fair sex,
and since I am persuaded that all the natural inclinations are good and right in
themselves, I am of the opinion that this one should be cultivated like the others.
The only issue is preventing its abuse.
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BOOK V
As to the truth of this remark, I rely on every observer of good faith. I do not
want women themselves to be examined on this point. Our constraining institutions
may have forced them to sharpen their wits. I want girls to be examined—little
girls who are, so to speak, just born—and I want them to be compared with little
boys of the same age; and if the latter do not appear heavy, giddy, and stupid next
to the girls, I shall be incontestably wrong. Permit me a single example taken in
all its puerile naivete.
It is very common to forbid children to ask for anything at meals; for it is
believed that their education is never more successful than when it is overburdened
with useless precepts—as though a morsel of this or that could not be speedily
granted or refused * without making a poor child constantly die of covetousness
whetted by hope. Everybody knows the skill of a young boy subjected to this law who
had been forgotten at a meal and took it into his head to ask for salt, etc. I
shall not say that one could quibble with him for having directly asked for salt
and indirectly for meat. The omission was so cruel that, if he had openly infringed
the law and straightforwardly said that he was hungry, I cannot believe that he
would have been punished for it. But here is how a six-year-old girl went about
solving such a problem in my presence. The case was much more difficult. Not only
was she strictly forbidden ever to ask for anything either directly or indirectly,
but since she had eaten some of all the dishes—except one which they had forgotten
to give her and which she coveted very much^-disobedience would not have been
pardonable.
Now, in order to obtain redress for this oversight without anyone being able to
accuse her of disobedience, she stuck out her finger and passed all the dishes in
review, saying aloud as she pointed to them, "I have eaten some of that one; I have
eaten some of that one." But she made so visible a display of silently passing over
the one of which she had not eaten that someone noticed it and said to her, "Didn't
you eat some of that one?" "Oh, no," replied the little glutton, sweetly lowering
her eyes. I shall add nothing. Compare. This trick is the ruse of a girl; the other
is the ruse of a boy.
What is, is good, and no general law is bad. This peculiar cleverness given to the
fair sex is a very equitable compensation for their lesser share of strength, a
compensation without which women would be not man's companion but his slave. It is
by means of this superiority in talent that she keeps herself his equal and that
she governs him while obeying him. Woman has everything against her—our defects,
her timidity, and her weakness. She has in her favor only her art and her beauty.
Is it not just that she cultivate both? But beauty is not general; it is destroyed
by countless accidents; it passes with the years; habit destroys its effect. Wit
alone is the true resource of the fair sex—not that stupid wit which the social
world values so highly and which is of no use for making women's lives happy, but
the wit which suits their position and consists in an art of exploiting man's
position and putting
* A child becomes importunate when he finds that it is to his advantage to be so.
But he will never ask for the same thing twice if the first response is always
irrevocable.
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our peculiar advantages to their use. We do not recognize how useful this feminine
cleverness is to us, how much charm it adds to the society of the two sexes, how
much it serves to repress the petulance of children, how many brutal husbands it
restrains, how many good households it maintains which would be troubled by discord
without it. I know that crafty and wicked women abuse it. But what does vice not
abuse? Let us not destroy the instruments of happiness because the wicked sometimes
use them to do harm.
One can shine by means of adornment, but one can please only by means of one's
person. We are not our clothes. Often they detract from us by their elaborateness.
The clothes that make the woman who wears them most noticed are often those that
are least noticed in themselves. On this point the education of young girls is
completely mistaken. They are promised ornaments as a reward and are taught to like
elaborate finery. "How beautiful she is!" we say to them when they are heavily
adorned. We ought, on the contrary, to make them understand that so much clothing
is put on only to hide some defects and that the true triumph of beauty is to shine
by itself. The love of fashions is in bad taste because our visages do not change
with them; and since one's looks stay the same, what suits them once, suits them
always.
If I saw the young girl strutting in her finery, I would appear anxious about her
looks being disguised in this way and about what someone might think about it. I
would say, "All these ornaments adorn her too much. That's too bad. Do you believe
that she could get by with simpler ones? Is she beautiful enough to do without this
one or that one?" Perhaps she will then be the first to beg that this ornament be
taken from her, and that she then be judged. This is the case in which she should
be applauded, if there are grounds for it. I would never praise her so much as when
she is most simply dressed. When she regards adornment only as a supplement to the
graces of her person and as a tacit avowal that she needs help in order to please,
she will not be proud of her clothes, she will be humble about them. And if, when
she is more adorned than usual, she hears someone say, "How beautiful she is!" she
will blush with chagrin.
Moreover, some people have looks that need adornment, but none requires rich
finery. Costly adornments come from the vanity of rank and not from vanity about
one's person; they depend solely on prejudice. True coquetry is sometimes
elaborate, but it is never showy; and Juno dressed herself up more superbly than
Venus did." "Unable to make her beautiful, you made her rich," said Appelles to a
bad painter who painted Helen heavily loaded with finery.'- I have also noticed
that the most sumptuous adornment usually marks ugly women. There could not be a
more maladroit kind of vanity. Give some ribbons, gauze, muslin, and flowers to a
tasteful young girl who despises fashion. Without diamonds, tassels, or lace * she
is going to produce for herself an
* Women who have skin white enough to do without lace would cause a great deal of
chagrin to the others if they were not to wear it. It is almost always ugly persons
who lead the fashions to which the beautiful ones are so stupid as to subject
themselves.
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BOOK V
outfit that will make her a hundred times more charming than all the brilliant rags
of La Duchapt would.l:i
Since what is good is always good, and one must always do the best one can, women
who know something about styles choose good ones and stick to them; and since they
are not changing them every day, they are less involved with them than are those
who do not know what to choose. True care for adornment requires little time at the
dressing table. Young misses rarely indulge in the ceremony of the dressing table;
I4 work and lessons fill their day. Nevertheless they are in general made up—with
the exception of rouge—with as much care as fashionable ladies, and often in better
taste. The abuse of the dressing table is not what one thinks; it comes far more
from boredom than from vanity. A woman who spends six hours at her dressing table
is not unaware that she does not go out better made up than a woman who only spends
half an hour at it, but those hours are subtracted from the tedious march of time;
and it is better to be entertained with oneself than to be bored with everything.
Without the dressing table what could one do with life from noon to nine o'clock?
By gathering around themselves other women to irritate, they can entertain
themselves. That is already something. They avoid being alone with a husband whom
they see only at this hour. That is much more. And then come the merchants, the
salesmen, the fops, the scribblers, the poems, the songs, the pamphlets. Without
the dressing table all this could not be so conveniently assembled. The only real
profit connected with the thing is the pretext that it gives them for showing off a
bit more of themselves than when they are dressed. But this profit is perhaps not
as great as is thought, and women at their dressing table do not gain by it as much
as they would like to say. Do not scruple to give women a woman's education; see to
it that they like the cares of their sex, that they are modest, that they know how
to watch over their households and busy themselves in their homes. The dressing
table ceremonial will disappear by itself, and they will consequently be dressed in
better taste.
The first thing that young persons notice in growing up is that all these external
attractions are not sufficient for them if they have none of their own. A girl can
never give herself beauty, and she is not all that soon in a condition to acquire
the art of coquetry. But she can already seek to give an attractive turn to her
gestures and a nattering accent to her voice, to gain composure in her bearing, to
walk lightly, to assume gracious attitudes, and to choose situations where she
looks her best. The voice's range increases, it gets stronger and gains timbre; the
arms develop; the step becomes sure; and she perceives that, however she is
dressed, there is an art of getting looked at. From then on, needlework and
household tasks are no longer her only concerns. New talents present themselves and
already make their utility felt.
I know that severe teachers want neither song nor dance nor any of the pleasing
arts to be taught to young girls. That seems amusing to me! And to whom do they
want them to be taught? To boys? To whom, men or women, do these talents specially
belong? "To no one," they will respond. "Profane songs are nothing but crimes.
Dance is an
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invention of the Demon. A young girl ought to have only her work and prayer as
entertainment." Strange entertainments for a ten-year-old child. As for me, I am
very much afraid that these little saints who are forced to spend their childhood
in praying to God will spend their youth in something entirely different and when
married do their best to make up for the time they think they wasted as girls. I
consider it necessary to take account of what is suitable to age as well as to sex—
that a young girl ought not to live like her grandmother, that she ought to be
lively, playful, and frolicsome, to sing and dance as much as she pleases, and to
taste all the innocent pleasures of her age. The time to be composed and to adopt a
more serious bearing will come only too soon.
But is there a genuine necessity even for this change in behavior? Is it not
perhaps also a fruit of our prejudices? By enslaving decent women only to gloomy
duties, we have banished from marriage everything which could make it attractive to
men. Ought we to be surprised if the taciturnity they see reigning at home drives
them from it or if they are scarcely tempted to embrace so unpleasant a condition?
By exaggerating all duties, Christianity makes them impractable and vain. By
forbidding women song, dance, and all the entertainments of the world, it makes
them sullen, shrewish, and unbearable in their homes. There is no other religion in
which marriage is subjected to such severe duties and none in which so holy an
obligation is so despised. So much has been done to prevent women from being
lovable that husbands have become indifferent. I understand quite well that this
ought not to be. But I say that it had to be, since, after all, Christians are men.
As for me, I would want a young Englishwoman to cultivate pleasing talents that
will entertain her future husband with as much care as a young Albanian cultivates
them for the harem of Ispahan. It will be said that husbands do not care too much
for all these talents. Indeed, I believe it, when these talents, far from being
employed to please them, are used only as bait for attracting to their homes
impudent young men who dishonor them. But do you think that a lovable and pure
woman who possessed such talents and consecrated them to the entertainment of her
husband would not add to the happiness of his life and would not prevent him, when
he left his office exhausted, from going to look for recreation outside his home?
Has no one seen happy families assembled where each member knows how to provide
something of his own for the common entertainments? Let him say whether the
confidence and familiarity which are combined there and whether the innocence and
the gentleness of the pleasures which are tasted there do not amply compensate for
the greater boisterousness of public pleasures.
The pleasing talents have been too much reduced into arts. People have generalized
too much about them. Everything has been made into maxims and precepts, and what
ought to be only entertainment and frolicsome games for young people has been made
quite boring to them. I can imagine nothing more ridiculous than the sight of a
dancing or singing master with a scowling aspect approaching young persons eager to
laugh and adopting with them a more pedantic and more magisterial tone in order to
teach them his frivolous science than if the
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BOOK V
subject were their catechism. Does the art of singing, for example, depend on
written music? Cannot someone make his voice flexible and true, learn to sing with
taste, and even to accompany himself, without knowing a single note? Does the same
kind of music suit all voices? Does the same method suit all minds? No one will
ever make me believe that the same attitudes, the same steps, the same movements,
the same gestures, and the same dances suit a lively and piquant little brunette
and a big, beautiful blonde with languid eyes. Therefore, when I see a master
giving both exactly the same lessons, I say, "This man follows his routine, but he
understands nothing of his art."
It is asked whether girls ought to have male or female masters. I do not know. I
would much prefer that they needed neither the one nor the other, that they learned
freely what they have so strong an inclination to want to learn, and that so many
glittering mountebanks were not constantly seen wandering about our cities. I have
some difficulty in believing that relations with these people are not more harmful
to young girls than their lessons are useful. Their jargon, their tone, and their
airs give the first taste for the frivolities that are so important for them to
their pupils; and the pupils will be quick, following their masters' example, to
make these their sole occupation.
In the arts which aim only at being pleasing, everything can serve as a master for
young people—their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their sisters, their
friends, their governesses, their mirrors, and above all their own taste. They
should not be offered lessons; they should be the ones to ask for them. A reward
ought not to be made into a chore; and it is especially in this sort of study that
the first step toward success is to want to succeed. Finally, if regular lessons
are absolutely required, I shall not decide about the sex of those who ought to
give them. I do not know whether a dancing master should take a young pupil by her
delicate white hand, make her raise her skirt, lift her eyes, spread her arms, and
thrust out her palpitating breast; but I know that I would not want to be that
master for anything in the world.
Taste is formed by means of industriousness and talents. By means of taste the mind
is imperceptibly opened to ideas of the beautiful of every sort and, finally, to
the moral notions related to them. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the
sentiment of seemliness and decency is to be found sooner in girls than in boys;
for to believe that this precocious sentiment is the work of governesses, one would
have to be ill informed about the bent of girls' studies and the development of the
human mind. Talent at speaking holds first place in the art of pleasing; it is by
means of this talent alone that new charms can be added to those to which the
senses grow accustomed with habit. It is the mind which not only gives life to the
body but in a way renews it. It is by the succession of sentiments and ideas that
the mind animates and varies the face; and it is by speech that the mind inspires
sustained attention and keeps it focused with the same interest on the same objects
for a long time. It is for all these reasons, I believe, that young girls learn to
chatter attractively so quickly, that they put expression into their remarks even
before having the sentiments that go with them, and that men are entertained by
listening to those remarks at so early an
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age, even before the girls themselves are able to understand them. The men are
spying out the first moment of this intelligence in order to enter into the first
moment of sentiment.
Women have flexible tongues; they talk sooner, more easily, and more attractively
than men. They are also accused of talking more. This ought to be so, and I would
gladly turn this reproach into praise. The mouth and the eyes are both very active
among women, and for the same reason. Man says what he knows; woman says what
pleases. He needs knowledge to speak; she needs taste. Useful things ought to be
his principal object and pleasing things ought to be hers. The truth ought to be
the only element common to their discourse.
Therefore, one should not restrain the chatter of girls, like that of boys, with
this harsh question: "What is it good for?" but one should put another question,
whose response is no easier: "What effect will it have?" At this early age, when
they are still unable to discern good and bad and are no one's judges, they ought
to impose a law on themselves to say only what is pleasing to those to whom they
speak. And what makes the practice of this rule more difficult is that it always
remains subordinate to the first law, which is never to lie.
I see many more difficulties as well, but they belong to a more advanced age. For
the present, being truthful can cost young girls only the effort of being so
without coarseness, and since this coarseness is naturally repugnant to them,
education easily teaches them to avoid it. In social relations I note that
generally the politeness of men is more obliging and that of women more caressing.
This difference does not come from education; it is natural. Man appears to make
more of an effort to serve you, and woman to please you. It follows from this that,
whatever the character of women may be, their politeness is less false than ours;
it only extends their first instinct. But when a man feigns to prefer my interest
to his own, no matter what protestations he may make to cover this lie, I am quite
sure that he is telling one. It does not, then, cost women much to be polite; nor
consequently does it cost girls much to learn to become so. The first lesson comes
from nature; art does no more than follow nature and determine in what form
politeness ought to be manifested according to our usages. The politeness of women
with one another is an entirely different matter. They give it such an air of
constraint and their attentions are so cold that, in making one another mutually
uncomfortable, they take little care to hide their own discomfort; thus they seem
sincere in their lie by scarcely seeking to disguise it. Nevertheless young girls
sometimes make genuine and franker friendships. At their age gaiety takes the place
of good nature; and since they are satisfied with themselves, they are satisfied
with everyone. They also invariably kiss one another more readily and caress one
another with more grace in the presence of men; for they take pride in sharpening
men's lust by the image of those favors they know how to make men desire.
If one ought not to permit young boys to ask prying questions, one ought a fortiori
to forbid them to young girls. The satisfaction of their curiosity—or the clumsy
evasion of it—is of much greater significance given their keen sense of—and skill
at discovering—the mysteries
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BOOK V
one hides from them. But without permitting them to make interrogations, I would
wish that they be interrogated a good deal themselves, that care be taken to make
them chat, and that they be stirred up in order to make them speak easily, to make
them lively at retort, to loosen their minds and their tongues while it can be done
without danger. These conversations, which should always be marked by gaiety but
also artfully arranged and well directed, would make a charming entertainment at
that age and could bring to the innocent hearts of these young persons the first
and perhaps the most useful moral lessons they will receive in their lives. While
enticing them through pleasure and vanity, these conversations would teach them
which qualities men truly esteem and what constitutes the glory and happiness of a
decent woman.
One can easily understand that if male children are not in a position to form for
themselves any true idea of religion, a fortiori the same idea is beyond the
conception of girls. It is for that very reason that I would wish to speak to them
about it earlier, for if one had to wait for girls to be in a position to discuss
these profound questions methodically, one would run the risk of never speaking to
them about it at all. Women's reason is practical and makes them very skillful at
finding means for getting to a known end, but not at finding that end itself. The
social relationship of the sexes is an admirable thing. This partnership produces a
moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man is the arm, but they have
such a dependence on one another that the woman learns from the man what must be
seen and the man learns from the woman what must be done. If woman could ascend to
general principles as well as man can, and if man had as good a mind for details as
woman does, they would always be independent of one another, they would live in
eternal discord, and their partnership could not exist. But in the harmony which
reigns between them, everything tends to the common end; they do not know who
contributes more. Each follows the prompting of the other; each obeys, and both are
masters.
Due to the very fact that in her conduct woman is enslaved by public opinion, in
her belief she is enslaved by authority. Every girl ought to have her mother's
religion, and every woman her husband's. If this religion is false, the docility
which subjects mother and daughter to the order of nature erases from God's sight
the sin of this error. Since women are not in a position to be judges themselves,
they ought to receive the decision of fathers and husbands like that of the Church.
Unable to draw the rule of their faith from themselves alone, women cannot set
limits of certainty and reason to their faith; they let themselves be carried away
by countless external influences, and thus they are always beneath or beyond the
true. Always extreme, they are all libertines or fanatics; there are none who know
how to join wisdom with piety. The source of this evil is not only in the
extravagant character of their sex but in the ill-regulated authority of ours: our
libertinism of morals makes piety despised; the terrors of repentance render piety
tyrannical; and that is how we always do too much or too little with respect to
piety.
Since authority ought to rule the religion of women, the issue is not
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so much one of explaining to them the reasons there are for believing as of
explaining distinctly what we believe; for faith that is given to obscure ideas is
the first source of fanaticism, and faith that one is required to give to absurd
things leads to madness or disbelief. I do not know which our catechisms lead to
most—impiety or fanaticism— but I certainly know that they necessarily lead to one
or the other.
If you are teaching religion to young girls, in the first place never make it an
object of gloom and constraint for them, and never make it a task or a duty.
Consequently, never make them learn anything relating to it by heart, not even
prayers. Be content to say yours in their presence without forcing them to be
there. Make your prayers short, according to the teaching of Jesus Christ.15 Always
say them with suitable meditation and respect. Consider that, when we ask the
Supreme Being for His attention, it is certainly incumbent upon us to give our
attention to what we are going to say to Him.
It is less important that young girls know their religion early than that they know
it well and, above all, that they love it. When you make it onerous for them, when
you always depict God as being angry with them, when you impose on them in His name
countless irksome duties that they never see you fulfilling, what can they think,
other than that to know one's catechism and to pray to God are the duties of little
girls; thus they desire to be grown-up in order to be exempted like you from all
this subjection. Set an example! Otherwise one never succeeds at anything with
children.
When you expound articles of faith to them, do it in the form of direct teaching
and not by question and answer. They ought to respond only with what they think and
never with what has been dictated to them. All the answers of the catechism are
misconceived. It is the pupil who teaches the master. In the mouths of children
these answers are really lies, since the children expound what they do not
understand and affirm what they are not in a position to believe. Even among the
most intelligent men, show me those who do not lie in saying their catechism.
The first question I see in our catechism is the following: "Who created you and
put you in the world?" To this the little girl, really believing that it is her
mother, nevertheless says without hesitation that it is God. The only thing she
sees here is that in reply to a question she hardly understands, she gives an
answer she does not understand at all.
I wish that a man who knows the development of children's minds would be willing to
make a catechism for them. This would perhaps be the most useful book ever written,
and in my opinion it would not be the one which would do the least honor to his
Author. What is quite certain is that, if this book were good, it would hardly
resemble our catechisms.
Such a catechism will be good only if the child, when he is asked the questions,
gives the answers on his own without having to learn them. Of course, the child
will sometimes be ready to ask questions in turn. To make what I mean understood a
sort of model would be needed, and I certainly sense what I lack for outlining it.
I shall attempt at least to give some slight idea of it.
[.378]
BOOK V
I imagine, then, that to get to the first question of our catechism, it would have
to begin pretty much as follows:
nurse Do you remember the time when your mother was a girl?
little girl No, nurse.
nurse Why not, since you have so good a memory?
little girl Because I was not yet in the world.
nurse Then you have not always been alive?
LITTLE GIRL No.
nurse Will you always be alive?
LITTLE GIRL Yes.
nurse Are you young or old?
little girl I am young.
nurse And is your grandmother young or old?
little girl She is old.
nurse Was she once young?
little girl Yes.
nurse Why isn't she young anymore?
little girl Because she got old.
nurse Will you get old like her?
little girl I don't know.*
nurse Where are your last year's dresses?
little girl They have been torn up.
nurse And why were they torn up?
little girl Because they were too small for me.
nurse And why were they too small for you?
little girl Because I have grown.
nurse Will you still grow?
little girl Oh, yes.
nurse And what do big girls become?
little girl They become women.
nurse And what do women become?
little girl They become mothers.
nurse And what do mothers become?
little girl They become old.
nurse Will you, then, become old?
little girl When I am a mother.
nurse And what do old people become?
little girl I don't know.
nurse What became of your grandfather?
little girl He died.t
nurse And why did he die?
little girl Because he was old.
* If at any point where I have put, "1 don't know," the little girl answers
otherwise, her answer must be distrusted, and she must be made to explain it
carefully.
t The little girl will say this because she has heard it said, but it must be
verified whether she has some accurate idea of death; for this idea is not so
simple or so much within the reach of children as is thought. One can see in the
little poem "Abel" an example of the way in which it ought to be imparted to them.
This charming work breathes a delicious simplicity which one cannot draw upon too
much for one's conversations with children."
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nurse What, then, becomes of old people?
little girl They die.
nurse And you, when you are old, what. . .
little girl (interrupting her) O, nurse, I don't want to die.
nurse My child, no one wants to die, but everyone dies.
little girl What? Will mama die, too?
nurse Like everyone else. Women get old just as men do, and old
age leads to death. little girl What must be done to grow old very late? nurse
Be good when one is young. little girl Nurse, I shall always be good. nurse
So much the better for you. But, still, do you believe you will
live forever? little girl When I am very old, very old . . . nurse Well,
then?
little girl Finally, when one is so old, you say that one has to die. nurse
Will you, then, die sometime? little girl Alas, yes. nurse Who was alive
before you? little girl My father and my mother. nurse Who was alive before
them? little girl Their father and their mother. nurse Who will be alive
after you? little girl My children. nurse Who will be alive after them?
little girl Their children, etc.
In following this route one finds, by easily sensed inductions, a beginning and an
end for the human race as for all things—that is to say, a father and a mother who
had neither father nor mother and children who will have no children.* It is only
after a long series of such questions that the way is sufficiently paved for the
first question of the catechism. Then only can one ask it, and the child understand
it. But from there to the second answer—which is, so to speak, the definition of
the divine essence—what an immense leap! When will this gap be filled? God is a
spirit! And what is a spirit? Will I launch the mind of a child into this obscure
metaphysics from which men have such trouble extricating themselves? It is not for
a little girl to resolve these questions. At most, she can pose them. Then I would
simply answer her, "You ask me what God is? It is not easy to say. God can neither
be heard nor seen, nor touched. He is known only by His works. To judge what He is,
wait until you know what He has done."
If our dogmas are all of equal truth, they are not for that reason all of equal
importance. It is quite unimportant for the glory of God that it be known to us in
all things; but it is important for human society and for each of its members that
every man know and fulfill the duties toward his neighbor and toward himself which
the law of God imposes on him. This is what we ought to teach one another
constantly, and
* The mind will not consent to apply the idea of eternity to human generations.
Actually going through any numerical succession is incompatible with this idea.
[380]
BOOK V
it is above all about this that fathers and mothers are obliged to instruct their
children. Whether a virgin is the mother of her Creator, whether she gave birth to
God or only to a man with whom God joined Himself, whether the substance of the
Father and the Son are the same or only similar, whether the Spirit proceeds from
one of these two who are the same or from both conjointly—I do not see that the
decision about these apparently essential questions is more important to the human
species than knowing on what day of the moon one ought to celebrate Easter, whether
one ought to tell one's beads, fast, abstain from meat, speak Latin or French in
church, adorn the walls with images, say or hear Mass, and not have a wife of one's
own. Let each person think about these things as he pleases. I do not know in what
way it can interest others; it does not interest me at all. But what interests me
and all my fellow men is that each person know that an arbiter of the fate of human
beings exists and that we are all His children; that He prescribes that we all be
just, love one another, be beneficent and merciful, and keep our promises to
everyone—even to our enemies and His; that the apparent happiness of this life is
nothing; that there is another life after it in which this Supreme Being will be
the rewarder of the good and the judge of the wicked. These and similar dogmas are
the ones it is important to teach the youth and to persuade all the citizens to
accept. Whoever combats them doubtless deserves punishment. He is the disturber of
order and the enemy of society. Whoever goes beyond them and wants to enslave us to
his private opinions gets to the same point by the opposite route. To establish
order in his way, he disturbs the peace; in his reckless pride he makes himself the
interpreter of the divinity. He demands in its name the homage and the respect of
men. He makes himself God and tries, insofar as he can, to take His place. He ought
to be punished for being sacrilegious, if he were not punished for being
intolerant.
Therefore, neglect all these mysterious dogmas which are only words without ideas
for us—all these bizarre doctrines whose vain study takes the place of virtues in
those who indulge in it and serves to make them mad rather than good. Always keep
your children within the narrow circle of the dogmas connected with morality.
Persuade them that there is nothing useful for us to know except that which teaches
us to do good. Do not make your daughters theologians and reasoners; teach them
regarding heaven only those things that serve human wisdom. Accustom them always to
feel themselves under the eyes of God; to have Him as witness of their actions,
their thoughts, their virtue, and their pleasures; to do good without ostentation
because He loves it; to suffer evil without a murmur because He will compensate
them for it; finally, to be all the days of their lives as they will be glad to
have been when they appear before Him. This is the true religion; this is the only
one which is susceptible of neither abuse nor impiety nor fanaticism. Let them
preach more sublime religions as much as they want; I recognize none other than
this.
Moreover, it is well to observe that up to the age when reason is enlightened, and
when nascent sentiment makes the conscience speak, what is good or bad for young
girls is what the people around them
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have decided it to be. What is commanded them is good; what is forbidden them is
bad. They ought not to know more. From this one can see how important—even more so
for them than for boys—is the choice of the persons who are going to be near them
and have some authority over them. Finally, the moment comes when they begin to
judge things by themselves, and then it is time to change the plan of their
education.
Perhaps I have said too much about it up to now. To what will we reduce women if we
give them as their law only public prejudices? Let us not bring down so low the sex
that governs us and honors us when we have not abased it. A rule prior to opinion
exists for the whole human species. It is to the inflexible direction of this rule
that all the others ought to be related. This rule judges prejudice itself, and
only insofar as the esteem of men accords with it ought this esteem to be
authoritative for us.
This rule is the inner sentiment. I shall not repeat what has been said about it
above. It suffices for me to remark that if these two rules do not cooperate in the
education of women, that education will always be defective. Sentiment without
opinion will not give them that delicacy of soul which adorns good morals with
worldly honor; and opinion without sentiment will only make them false and
dishonest women who put appearance in the place of virtue.
It is important, therefore, that they cultivate a faculty that serves as arbiter
between the two guides, which does not let the conscience go astray, and which
corrects the errors of prejudice. That faculty is reason. But how many questions
are raised by this word! Are women capable of solid reasoning? Is it important that
they cultivate it? Will they succeed in cultivating it? Is its cultivation useful
for the functions which are imposed on them? Is it compatible with the simplicity
that suits them?
The various ways of envisaging and resolving these questions result in opposite
extremes: those on one side limit woman to sewing and weaving in her household with
her servants and thus make her only the master's first servant; those on the other
side, not content with ensuring her rights, make her also usurp ours. For to leave
her above us in the qualities proper to her sex and to make her our equal in all
the rest is to transfer to the wife the primacy that nature gives to the husband.
The use of reason that leads man to the knowledge of his duties is not very
complex. The use of reason that leads woman to the knowledge of hers is even
simpler. The obedience and the fidelity she owes to her husband and the tenderness
and the care she owes to her children are consequences of her position so natural
and easily sensed that she cannot without bad faith refuse her consent to the inner
sentiment that guides her, nor fail to recognize her duty if her inclinations are
still uncorrupted.
I would not indiscriminately object to a woman's being limited to the labors of her
sex alone and left in profound ignorance of all the rest. But that would require
very simple and very healthy public morals
[382]
BOOK V
or a very retired way of life. In big cities and among corrupt men such a woman
would be too easy to seduce. Often her virtue would depend only on the occasion; in
this philosophic age she needs a virtue that can be put to the test. She needs to
know beforehand what might be said to her and what she ought to think about it.
Moreover, since she is subject to the judgment of men, she ought to merit their
esteem. She ought, above all, to obtain the esteem of her spouse. She ought to make
him not only love her person but also approve her conduct. She ought to justify the
choice he has made before the public and make her husband honored through the honor
given to his wife. How will she go about all this if she is ignorant of our
institutions, if she knows nothing of our practices and our proprieties, if she
knows neither the source of human judgments nor the passions determining them? As
soon as she depends on both her own conscience and the opinions of others, she has
to learn to compare these two rules, to reconcile them, and to prefer the former
only when the two are in contradiction. She becomes the judge of her judges; she
decides when she ought to subject herself to them and when she ought to take
exception to them. Before rejecting or accepting their prejudices, she weighs them.
She learns to go back to their source, to anticipate them, to use them to her
advantage. She is careful never to attract blame to herself when her duty permits
her to avoid it. None of this can be done well without cultivating her mind and her
reason.
I always return to my principle, and it provides me with the solution to all my
difficulties. I study what is, I seek its cause, and I finally find that what is,
is good. I go to parties at which master and mistress jointly do the honors. Both
have had the same education; both are equally polite, equally endowed with taste
and wit, and animated by the same desire to receive their guests well and to send
each away satisfied with them. The husband omits no care in order to be attentive
to all. He goes; he comes; he makes his rounds and puts himself out in countless
ways; he would like to be all attentiveness. The woman stays put; a little circle
forms around her and seems to hide the rest of the gathering from her. However,
nothing takes place that she does not notice; no one leaves to whom she has not
spoken; she has omitted nothing that could interest everyone; she has said nothing
to anyone that was not agreeable to him; and without in any way upsetting the
order, the least important person among her company is no more forgotten than the
most important. Dinner is served. All go to the table. The man, knowledgeable about
who gets along with whom, will seat them on the basis of what he knows. The woman,
without knowing anything, will make no mistakes about it. She will have already
read, in their eyes and in their bearing, everything about who belongs with whom,
and each guest will find himself placed where he wants to be. I do not say that
when the food is served, no one is forgotten. But even though the master of the
house may have forgotten no one when he passed around the food, his wife goes
further and divines what you look at with pleasure and offers you some. In speaking
to her neighbor, she has her eye on the end of the table;- she distinguishes
between the guest
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who does not eat because he is not hungry, and the one who does not dare to help
himself or to ask because he is awkward or timid. On leaving the table each guest
believes that she has thought only of him. All think that she has not had time to
eat a single bite. But the truth is that she has eaten more than anyone.
When everyone has left, they talk about what has happened. The man reports what was
said to him, what those with whom he conversed said and did. It is not always here
that the woman is most accurate, but she has seen what was whispered at the other
end of the room. She knows what this person thought, to what this remark or that
gesture related. Hardly a meaningful gesture was made for which she does not have a
ready interpretation, and one almost always in conformity with the truth.
The same turn of mind that makes a woman of the world excel in the art of being a
hostess makes a coquette excel in the art of entertaining several suitors. The
skills of coquetry require a discernment even more refined than those of
politeness; for provided that a woman be polite toward everyone, she has always
done well enough; but the coquette would soon lose her empire by this maladroit
uniformity. By dint of wanting to oblige all her lovers, she would repel them all.
In society, the manners a woman adopts with all men do not fail to please each.
Provided that a man is well treated, he does not look too closely for preferences.
But in love, the favors which are not exclusive are an insult. A sensitive man
would prefer a hundred times over to be the only one ill treated than to be
caressed with all the others, and the worst thing that can happen to him is not to
be singled out. Therefore, a woman who wants to preserve several lovers has to
persuade each of them that she prefers him, and she has to persuade him of it under
the eyes of all the others—whom she is persuading of the same thing under his eyes.
Do you want to see an embarrassed person? Put a man between two women with whom he
has secret relations, and then observe what a foolish figure he cuts. Put a woman
in the same situation between two men (and surely the example will be no rarer);
you will be amazed at the skill with which she will put both off the scent and act
so that each will laugh at the other. Now if this woman gave witness of the same
confiding behavior to both and adopted the same familiarity with both, how would
they be her dupes for an instant? By treating them equally, would she not show that
they have the same rights over her? Oh, how much better than that she goes about
it! Far from treating them in the same way, she affects to establish an inequality
between them. She does so well that the one she flatters believes it is out of
tenderness, and the one she maltreats believes that it is out of spite. Thus each
is content with his share and always believes she is concerned with him, while
actually she is concerned with herself alone.
Coquetry suggests similar means to the general desire to please; capriciousness
would only repel if it were not prudently managed, and it is by dispensing it
artfully that she makes the strongest chains for her slaves.
[384]
BOOK V
Usa ogn arte la donna, onde sia colto Nella sua rete alcun novello amante; Ne con
tutti, ne sempre un stesso volto Serba, ma cangia a tempo atto e sembiante.11
On what does this whole art depend if not on sharp and continuous observations
which make her see what is going on in men's hearts at every instant, and which
dispose her to bring to each secret movement that she notices the force needed to
suspend or accelerate it? Now, is this art learned? No, it is born with women. They
all possess it, and men never have it to the same degree. This is one of the
distinctive characteristics of the fair sex. Presence of mind, incisiveness, and
subtle observations are the science of women; cleverness at taking advantage of
them is their talent.
This is what is, and it has been seen why it ought to be. We are told that women
are false. They become so. Their particular gift is skill and not falseness.
According to the true inclinations of their sex, even when they are lying they are
not false. Why do you consult their mouth when it is not the mouth which ought to
speak? Consult their eyes, their color, their breathing, their fearful manner,
their soft resistance. This is the language nature gives them for answering you.
The mouth always says no and ought to say so. But the accent it adds to this answer
is not always the same, and this accent does not know how to lie. Does not woman
have the same needs as man without having the same right to express them? Her fate
would be too cruel if, even in the case of legitimate desires, she did not have a
language equivalent to the one she dare not use. Must her modesty make her unhappy?
Must she not have an art of communicating her inclinations without laying them
bare? What skill she needs to get stolen from her what she is burning to give! How
important it is for her to learn to touch the heart of man without appearing to
think of him! Is not Galatea's apple and her maladroit flight a charming speech? 18
What will she need to add to that? Will she go and tell the shepherd who follows
her among the willows that she flees there only with the design of attracting him?
She would be lying, so to speak, for then she would no longer attract him. The more
reserve a woman has, the more art she must have, even with her husband. Yes, I
maintain that in keeping coquetry within its limits, one makes it modest and true;
one makes it a law of decency.
Virtue is one, as one of my adversaries has very well said.10 One cannot split
virtue up to accept one part and reject another. When someone loves it, he loves it
in all its wholeness; and he closes his heart when he can—and always closes his
mouth—to sentiments he ought not to have. Moral truth is not what is, but what is
good. What is bad ought not to be and ought not to be admitted, especially when
this admission gives it an effect it would not otherwise have had. If I were
tempted to steal and by saying so I tempted another to be my accomplice, would not
declaring my temptation to him be to succumb to it? Why do you say that modesty
makes women false? Are those who lose it most completely also truer than the
others? Far from it. They
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are a thousand times more false. One gets to that point of depravity only by dint
of vices all of which one keeps and which reign only under the cover of intrigues
and lies.* On the contrary, those who still have shame, who do not take pride in
their faults, who know how to hide their desires from the very persons who inspire
them, and whose avowals are the hardest to extract are also the truest, the most
sincere, and the most constant in all their engagements and those on whose faith
one can generally most rely.
I know of no one other than Mademoiselle de l'Enclos who can be cited as a known
exception to these remarks. And Mademoiselle de l'Enclos passed for a marvel. In
her contempt for the virtues of her sex, she had, it is said, preserved those of
ours. People praise her frankness, her rectitude, the security one had in
associating with her, her fidelity in friendship. Finally, to complete the picture
of her glory, it is said that she had made herself a man. Wonderful. But with all
her great reputation, I would have no more wanted that man for my friend than for
my mistress.21
All this is not so much off the subject as it appears to be. I see where the maxims
of modern philosophy lead in ridiculing the modesty of the fair sex and its alleged
falseness, and I see that the most certain effect of this philosophy will be to
take from the women of our age the bit of honor remaining to them.
On the basis of these considerations I believe that one can determine in general
what kind of cultivation suits the minds of women and toward what objects their
reflections ought to be turned from their youth.
I have already said that the duties of their sex are easier to see than to fulfill.
The first thing that they ought to learn is to love their duties out of regard for
their advantages. This is the only way to make their duties easy for them. Each
station and each age has its duties. We soon know our own, provided we love them.
Honor woman's station, and in whatever rank heaven puts you, you will always be a
good woman. The essential thing is to be what nature made us. A woman is always
only too much what men want her to be.
The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the
sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within the
competence of women. All their studies ought to be related to practice. It is for
them to apply the principles man has found, and to make the observations which lead
man to the establishment of principles. Regarding what is not immediately connected
with their duties, all the reflections of women ought to be directed to the study
of men or to the pleasing kinds of knowledge that have only taste as their aim;
for, as regards works of genius, they are out of the reach of women.
* I know that women who have openly taken a position on a certain question claim
that they make the most of this frankness, and swear that, with only this
exception, there is nothing estimable which is not to be found in them. But I do
know that they never persuaded anyone but a fool of that. With the greatest curb on
their sex removed, what remains to restrain them, and what part of honor will they
take seriously when they have renounced that which belongs to them? Once having put
their passions at ease, they no longer have any interest in resisting: nee femina
amissa pudicitia alia abnuerit.-" Did an author ever know the human heart in the
two sexes better than the one who said that?
[386]
BOOK V
Nor do women have sufficient precision and attention to succeed at the exact
sciences. And as for the physical sciences, they are for the sex which is more
active, gets around more, and sees more objects, the sex which has more strength
and uses it more to judge the relations of sensible beings and the laws of nature.
Woman, who is weak and who sees nothing outside the house, estimates and judges the
forces she can put to work to make up for her weakness, and those forces are men's
passions. Her science of mechanics is more powerful than ours; all her levers
unsettle the human heart. She must have the art to make us want to do everything
which her sex cannot do by itself and which is necessary or agreeable to it. She
must, therefore, make a profound study of the mind of man—not an abstraction of the
mind of man in general, but the minds of the men around her, the minds of the men
to whom she is subjected by either law or opinion. She must learn to penetrate
their sentiments by their words, their actions, their looks, their gestures. She
must know how to communicate to them—by her words, her actions, her looks, her
gestures—the sentiments that she wishes to communicate without appearing even to
dream of it. Men will philosophize about the human heart better than she does; but
she will read in men's hearts better than they do. It is for women to discover
experimental morality, so to speak, and for us to reduce it to a system. Woman has
more wit, man more genius; woman observes, and man reasons. From this conjunction
results the clearest insight and the most complete science regarding itself that
the human mind can acquire—in a word, the surest knowledge of oneself and others
available to our species. And this is how art can constantly tend to the perfection
of the instrument given by nature.
The world is the book of women. When they do a bad job of reading it, it is their
fault, or else some passion blinds them. Nevertheless, the true mother of a family
is hardly less of a recluse in her home than a nun is in her cloister. Thus it is
necessary to do for young persons who are about to be married what is done or ought
to be done for those who are put in convents—to show them the pleasures they
abandon before letting them renounce them, lest the false image of those pleasures
which are unknown to them come one day to lead their hearts astray and disturb the
happiness of their retreat. In France girls live in convents and women frequent
society. With the ancients it was exactly the opposite. Girls, as I have said, had
many games and public festivals. Women led retired lives. This practice was more
reasonable and maintained morals better. A sort of coquetry is permitted to
marriageable girls; enjoying themselves is their chief business. Women have other
concerns at home and no longer have husbands to seek; but they would not find this
reform to their advantage, and unfortunately they set the tone. Mothers, at least
make your daughters your companions. Give them good sense and a decent soul; then
hide nothing from them which a chaste eye can look at. Balls, feasts, games, even
the theater—everything which, seen in the wrong way, constitutes the charm of an
imprudent youth—can be offered without risk to healthy eyes. The better they see
these boisterous pleasures, the sooner they will be disgusted by them.
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I hear the clamor raised against me. What girl resists such dangerous examples?
They have hardly seen society before all their heads are turned. Not one of them
wants to leave it. That may be so. But before presenting this deceptive picture to
them, did you prepare them to see it without emotion? Have you made the objects it
represents quite clear to them? Have you carefully depicted these objects as they
are? Did you arm these girls well against the illusions of vanity? Did you impart
to their young hearts a taste for the true pleasures which are not found amidst
this tumult? What precautions, what measures have you taken to preserve them from
the false taste that leads them astray? Far from opposing in any way the empire of
public prejudices over their minds, you have fed these prejudices! You have made
these girls love every frivolous entertainment before they experienced it. You make
them love these entertainments even more when they indulge in them. Young persons
entering society have no governess other than their mother, who is often more
foolish than they are and who cannot show them objects other than as she herself
sees them. Her example, which is stronger than reason itself, justifies them in
their own eyes, and the mother's authority is an unanswerable excuse for the
daughter. When I say that I want a mother to introduce her daughter into society, I
make the supposition that she will make her daughter see it as it is.
The evil begins even earlier. Convents are veritable schools of coquetry—not of
that decent coquetry about which I spoke, but of a coquetry which leads to all the
perversities of women and produces the most extravagant ladies of high fashion.
When young women make the abrupt transition from the convent to wild company, they
immediately feel they belong. They have been raised to live there. Should one be
surprised that they are content there? I do not advance what I am going to say
without fear of taking a prejudice for an observation, but it seems to me that in
Protestant countries there is generally more attachment to family and there are
worthier wives and tenderer mothers than in Catholic countries; and if this is the
case, one cannot doubt that this difference is in part due to convent education.
In order to love the peaceful and domestic life, we must know it. We must have
sensed its sweetness from childhood. It is only in the paternal home that one gets
the taste for one's own home, and any woman whose mother has not raised her will
not like raising her own children. Unfortunately there is no longer private
education in the big cities. Society there is so general and so mixed that there is
no longer a refuge to which to retire, and a person is in public even in his own
home. By dint of living with everyone, he no longer has a family, and he hardly
knows his own parents. They are viewed as strangers, and the simplicity of domestic
morals is extinguished along with the sweet familiarity which constituted their
charm. It is thus that we suck with our mother's milk a taste for the pleasures of
the age and its reigning maxims.
An apparent constraint is imposed on girls for the sake of finding the dupes who
marry them on the strength of their bearing. But study these young persons for a
moment. The lust that devours them is poorly disguised under a constrained air, and
one already reads in their
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BOOK V
eyes the ardent desire to imitate their mothers. What they covet is not a husband
but the license of marriage. What need is there of a husband with so many resources
for doing without one? But a husband is needed as a screen for the use of these
resources.* Modesty is on their faces, and libertinism is in the depths of their
hearts. This feigned modesty itself is a sign of libertinism. They affect modesty
only to be able to get rid of it sooner. Women of Paris and London, pardon me, I
beg you. No locale excludes miracles, but I do not know of any; and if a single one
of you has a truly decent soul, I understand nothing of our institutions.
All these diverse educations equally deliver young persons over to a taste for the
pleasures of high society and to the passions soon born of this taste. In big
cities depravity begins with life, and in little cities it begins with reasoning.
Young provincial women, taught to despise the happy simplicity of their morals,
hurry to Paris to share the corruption of ours. The vices, adorned with the fair
name of talents, are the sole object of their trip. When they arrive, they are
ashamed to find themselves so far behind the noble license of the local women, and
they do not delay in becoming worthy to live in the capital. Where does the evil
begin, in your opinion? In the places where the project is formed, or in those
where it is accomplished?
I do not want a sensible mother to take her daughter from the provinces to Paris to
show her these scenes which are so pernicious for others. But I say that even if
she did this, unless her daughter is badly raised, these scenes will hold little
danger for her. If one has taste, sense, and a love of decent things, one does not
find them so attractive as they are for those who let themselves be charmed by
them. In Paris one notices young scatterbrains who hurry to adopt the local tone
and make themselves fashionable for six months, only to be hooted for the rest of
their lives. But who notices those who are repelled by all this uproar and go back
to their provinces, content with their fate after having compared it to the one
others envy? How many young women I have seen who were brought to the capital by
obliging husbands able to take up residence there, and who then persuaded them not
to remain, who left more gladly than they came, and who said with emotion on the
eve of their departure, "Ah, let us return to our cottage! One lives more happily
there than in the palaces here." One does not know, moreover, how many good folk
there are who have never bent their knees before the idol and despise its senseless
worship. Only foolish women are boisterous; wise women do not make a sensation.
If in spite of the general corruption, in spite of universal prejudices, and in
spite of the bad education of girls, some still preserve a judgment that withstands
the test, what will it be when this judgment has been nourished by suitable
instruction—or, to put it better, when it has not been corrupted by vicious
instruction, for everything always consists in preserving or in restoring the
natural sentiments? The object is not to bore young girls with your long sermons or
to recite your
* The way of man in his youth was one of the four things the wise man could not
understand. The fifth was the impudence of the adulterous woman, quae comedit, et
tergens os suum dicit: non sum operata malum (Proverbs 3o:2o).2-'
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EMILE
dry moralisms to them. Moralizing is, for both sexes, the death of all good
education. Gloomy lessons are good only for producing hatred of those who give them
and everything they say. In speaking to young persons, the aim is not to make them
afraid of their duties nor to aggravate the yoke imposed on them by nature. In
expounding these duties to them, be precise and simple; do not let them believe
that a girl is afflicted when she fulfills these duties—no aggrieved bearing, no
pomposity. Everything that is to reach the heart must come from it. Their moral
catechism ought to be as short and as clear as their religious catechism, but it
ought not to be as grave. Show them in their very duties the source of their
pleasures and the foundation of their rights. Is it so hard to love in order to be
loved, to make oneself lovable in order to be happy, to make oneself estimable in
order to be obeyed, to honor oneself in order to be honored? How fine these rights
are! How respectable they are! How dear they are to the heart of man when woman
knows how to turn them to account! To enjoy them, she does not have to await the
passage of the years or the coming of old age. Her empire begins with her virtues.
Although her attractions have hardly developed, she already reigns by the sweetness
of her character and makes her modesty imposing. What insensitive and barbarous man
does not soften his pride and adopt more attentive manners near a sixteen-year-old
girl who is lovable and pure, who speaks little, who listens, whose bearing is
seemly and whose conversation is decent, whose beauty does not make her forget
either her sex or her youth, who knows how to inspire interest by her very timidity
and to gain for herself the respect she gives to everyone?
Although external, these testimonials are not frivolous. They are not founded
solely on the attraction of the senses. They come from the intimate sentiment we
all have that women are the natural judges of men's merit. Who wants to be despised
by women? No one in the world, not even a man who no longer wishes to love them.
And I who tell them such harsh truths, do you believe that their judgments are
indifferent to me? No, their approval is dearer to me than yours, readers—you who
are often more womanish than they are. In despising their morals, I still wish to
honor their justice. It is of little importance to me that they hate me if I force
them to esteem me.
How many great things could be done by means of this motive if one knew how to set
it in motion! Woe to the age in which women lose their ascendancy and in which
their judgments no longer have an effect on men! This is the last degree of
depravity. All peoples who have had morals have respected women. Look at Sparta;
look at the ancient Germans; look at Rome—Rome, home of glory and of virtue if ever
they had one on earth. It is there that women honored the exploits of great
generals, that they wept publicly for the fathers of the fatherland, that their
vows or their mourning were consecrated as the most solemn judgment of the
republic. All the great revolutions there came from women. Due to a woman Rome
acquired liberty; due to a woman the plebeians obtained the consulate; due to a
woman the tyranny of the Decemvirs was ended; due to women Rome, when besieged, was
saved from the hands of an outlaw. Gallant Frenchman, what would
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BOOK V
you have said when you saw this procession, so ridiculous to your mocking eyes,
passing by? You would have accompanied it with your jeers. How we see the same
objects with a different eye! And perhaps all of us are right. Form this cortege of
fair French ladies; I know nothing more indecent. But compose it of Roman women,
and you will have the eyes of all the Volsci and the heart of Coriolanus.28
I shall say more, and I maintain that virtue is no less favorable to love than to
the other rights of nature, and that the authority of the beloved gains no less
from virtue than does the authority of wives and mothers. There is no true love
without enthusiasm, and no enthusiasm without an object of perfection, real or
chimerical, but always existing in the imagination. What will enflame lovers for
whom this perfection no longer exists and who see in what they love only the object
of sensual pleasure? No, it is not thus that the soul is warmed and delivered to
those sublime transports which constitute the delirium of lovers and the charm of
their passion. In love everything is only illusion. I admit it. But what is real
are the sentiments for the truly beautiful with which love animates us and which it
makes us love. This beauty is not in the object one loves; it is the work of our
errors. So, what of it? Does the lover any the less sacrifice all of his low
sentiments to this imaginary model? Does he any the less suffuse his heart with the
virtues he attributes to what he holds dear? Does he detach himself any the less
from the baseness of the human I? Where is the true lover who is not ready to
immolate himself for his beloved, and where is the sensual and coarse passion in a
man who is willing to die? We make fun of the paladins.24 That is because they knew
love, and we no longer know anything but debauchery. When these romantic maxims
began to become ridiculous, the change was less the work of reason than of bad
morals.
Throughout the ages the natural relations do not change, and the standards of what
is or is not suitable that result from them remain the same. Prejudices parading
under the vain name of reason change nothing but the appearance of these standards.
It will always be a grand and beautiful thing to be in command of oneself, even in
order to obey fantastic opinions; and the true motives of honor will always speak
to the heart of every woman of judgment who knows how to seek life's happiness in
her position. Chastity must be a delicious virtue for a beautiful woman who has an
elevated soul. While she sees the whole earth at her feet, she triumphs over all
and over herself. She raises in her own heart a throne to which all come to render
homage. The tender or jealous but always respectful feelings of both sexes toward
her, the universal esteem she enjoys, and her own self-esteem constantly reward her
with a tribute of glory for a few momentary struggles. The privations are fleeting,
but the reward for them is permanent. What a joy for a noble soul when the pride of
virtue is joined to beauty! Bring the heroine of a romantic novel into reality. She
will taste delights more exquisite than the Laises -■"■ or the Cleopatras tasted.
And when her beauty is no more, her glory and her pleasure will still remain. She
alone will know how to enjoy the past.
The more our duties are great and difficult, the more they ought to
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EMILE
be founded on both strong and easily sensed reasons. There is a certain pious
language about the gravest subjects which is drummed into the ears of young girls
without persuading them. This language, which is all out of proportion with their
ideas and to which they secretly attach little importance, promotes in them a
facility at yielding to their inclinations, inasmuch as they lack reasons for
resistance founded on things themselves. A girl who is soberly and piously raised
doubtless has powerful arms against temptations; but one whose heart—or, rather,
whose ears —is fed solely with a mystical jargon infallibly becomes the prey of the
first adroit seducer who goes after her. A young and beautiful girl will never
despise her body, she will never in good faith grieve for the great sins her beauty
causes to be committed, she will never sincerely shed tears before God for being a
coveted object, and she will never be able to believe within herself that the
sweetest sentiment of the heart is an invention of Satan. Give her other reasons
that she can believe within and for herself, for these will never get through to
her. It will be worse yet if, as is almost always the case, one gives her
contradictory ideas, and after having humiliated her by disparaging her body and
its charms as the dirtiness of sin, one then makes her respect as the temple of
Jesus Christ the very body which has been made so contemptible to her. Ideas that
are too sublime and ideas that are too base are equally insufficient and cannot be
combined. A reason within the reach of her sex and her age is needed.
Considerations of duty have real force only to the extent that motives which lead
us to fulfill that duty are joined to it.
Quae quia non liceat non facit, ilia facit 20
One would not suspect that it is Ovid who passes so severe a judgment.
Do you want, then, to inspire young girls with the love of good morals? Without
constantly saying to them "Be pure," give them a great interest in being pure. Make
them feel all the value of purity, and you will make them love it. It does not
suffice to place this interest in the distant future. Show it to them in the
present moment, in the relationships of their own age, in the character of their
lovers. Depict for them the good man, the man of merit; teach them to recognize
him, to love him, and to love him for themselves; prove to them that this man alone
can make the women to whom he is attached—wives or beloveds —happy.-7 Lead them to
virtue by means of reason. Make them feel that the empire of their sex and all its
advantages depend not only on the good conduct and the morals of women but also on
those of men, that they have little hold over vile and base souls, and that a man
will serve his mistress no better than he serves virtue. You can then be sure that
in depicting to them the morals of our own days, you will inspire in them a sincere
disgust. In showing them fashionable people, you will make them despise them; you
will only be keeping them at a distance from their maxims and giving them an
aversion for their sentiments and a disdain for their vain gallantry. You will
cause a nobler ambition to be born in them—that of reigning over great and strong
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BOOK V
souls, the ambition of the women of Sparta, which was to command men.28 A bold,
brazen, scheming woman who knows how to attract her lovers only by coquetry and to
keep them only by favors makes them obey her like valets in servile and common
things; however, in important and weighty things she is without authority over
them. But the woman who is at once decent, lovable, and self-controlled, who forces
those about her to respect her, who has reserve and modesty, who, in a word,
sustains love by means of esteem, sends her lovers with a nod to the end of the
world, to combat, to glory, to death, to anything she pleases. This seems to me to
be a noble empire, and one well worth the price of its purchase. *
This is the spirit in which Sophie has been raised—with more care than effort, and
more by following her taste than by hindering it. Let us now say a word about her
person in accordance with the portrait I made of her for Emile, on the basis of
which he himself imagines the wife who can make him happy.
I shall never repeat often enough that I am leaving prodigies aside. Emile is no
prodigy, and Sophie is not one either. Emile is a man and Sophie is a woman;
therein consists all their glory. In the confounding of the sexes that reigns among
us, someone is almost a prodigy for belonging to his own sex.
Sophie is well born; she has a good nature; she has a very sensitive heart, and
this extreme sensitivity sometimes makes her imagination so active that it is
difficult to moderate. Her mind is less exact than penetrating; her disposition is
easy but nevertheless uneven; her face is ordinary but agreeable; her expression
gives promise of a soul and does not lie. One can approach her with indifference
but not leave her without emotion. Some have good qualities that are lacking to
her; others have a greater measure of those good qualities she does possess; but
none has a better combination of qualities for making a favorable character. She
knows how to take advantage even of her defects, and if she were more perfect, she
would be much less pleasing.
Sophie is not beautiful, but in her company men forget beautiful women, and
beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves. She is hardly pretty at first
sight, but the more one sees her, the better she looks; she gains where so many
others lose, and what she gains, she never loses again. Someone else may have more
beautiful eyes, a more beautiful mouth, a more impressive face; but no one could
have a better figure, a more beautiful complexion, a whiter hand, a daintier foot,
a gentler glance, or a more touching expression. Without dazzling, she inspires
interest, she charms, and one cannot say why.
Sophie loves adornment and is an expert at it. She is her mother's
* Brantome says that in the time of Francois I a young girl who had a talkative
lover imposed an absolute and unlimited silence on him, which he kept so faithfully
for two whole years that it was believed he had become mute as a result of illness.
One day in the midst of company, his beloved—who, in those times when love was
practiced with mystery, was not known to be such—boasted that she would cure him on
the spot and did so with the single word "Speak." Is there not something grand and
heroic in that love? What more could the philosophy of Pythagoras—for all its
ostentation—have accomplished? What woman today could count on a similar silence
for one day, even if she were to reward it with the greatest prize she can offer?
2I
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EMILE
only lady's maid. She has considerable taste in dressing herself up to advantage,
but she hates rich apparel; in her clothes one always sees simplicity joined with
elegance. She likes not like what is brilliant but what is suitable. She is
ignorant of what colors are fashionable, but she knows marvelously which look well
on her. There is no young girl who appears to be dressed with less study and whose
outfit is more studied; not a single piece of her clothing is chosen at random, and
yet art is apparent nowhere. Her adornment is very modest in appearance and very
coquettish in fact. She does not display her charms; she covers them, but, in
covering them, she knows how to make them imagined. When someone sees her, he says,
"Here is a modest, temperate girl." But so long as he stays near her, his eyes and
his heart roam over her whole person without his being able to take them away; and
one would say that all this very simple attire was put on only to be taken off
piece by piece by the imagination.
Sophie has natural talents. She is aware of them and has not neglected them. But
not having been in a position to devote much art to their cultivation, she was
content to train her pretty voice to sing tunefully and tastefully, her little feet
to walk lightly, easily, and gracefully and to curtsey in all sorts of situations
without difficulty and without awkwardness. Furthermore, she has had no singing
master other than her father and no dancing master other than her mother. An
organist in the neighborhood gave her some lessons in accompaniment on the
harpsichord which she has since cultivated alone. At first, she thought only of
making her hands appear to advantage on its black keys. Then she found that the
harsh, dry sound of the harpsichord made the sound of her voice sweeter. Little by
little she became sensitive to harmony. Finally, as she was growing up, she began
to feel the charms of expression and to love music for itself. But it is a taste
rather than a talent. She does not know how to read the notes of a tune.
What Sophie knows best and has been most carefully made to learn are the labors of
her own sex, even those that are not usually considered, like cutting and sewing
her dresses. There is no needlework which she does not know how to do and which she
does not do with pleasure. But the work she prefers to every other is lacework,
because there is none which results in a more agreeable pose and in which the
fingers are put to use more gracefully and lightly. She has also devoted herself to
all the details of the household. She understands the kitchen and the pantry. She
knows the price of foodstuffs and their qualities; she knows very well how to keep
the accounts; she serves her mother as butler. Destined to be mother of a family
herself one day, she learns to govern her own household by governing her parents'.
She can substitute for the domestics in the performance of their functions, and she
always does so gladly. One can never command well except when one knows how to do
the job oneself. That is her mother's reason for keeping her busy in this way.
Sophie herself does not think so far ahead. Her first duty is that of a girl, and
it is now the only one she thinks of fulfilling. The only thing she has in view is
serving her mother and relieving her of a part of her cares. It is nevertheless
true that she does not undertake them all with equal pleasure. For example,
although she is a glutton,
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BOOK V
she does not like the kitchen. There is something that disgusts her in its details;
she never finds it clean enough. In this regard she has an extreme delicacy, and
its excessiveness has become one of her failings. She would rather let her whole
dinner be thrown into the fire than get a spot on her cuff. She has never wanted to
oversee the garden for the same reason. The earth seems unclean to her. As soon as
she sees manure, she believes she smells its odor.
She owes this defect to her mother's lessons. According to the latter, cleanliness
is one of the first duties of women—a special duty, indispensable, imposed by
nature. Nothing in the world is more disgusting than an unclean woman, and the
husband who is disgusted by her is never wrong. Sophie's mother has so often
preached this duty to her daughter since childhood, has so often demanded
cleanliness in Sophie's person, her things, her room, her work, her grooming, that
all these attentions, which have turned into a habit, take a rather large part of
her time and also preside over the rest of it. The result is that to do what she
does well is only the second of her cares. The first is always to do it cleanly.
However, all this has not degenerated into vain affectation or softness. The
refinements of luxury play no part in it. In her rooms there was never anything but
simple water. She knows no perfume other than that of flowers; and her husband will
never smell anything sweeter than her breath. Finally, the attention she gives to
her exterior does not make her forget that she owes her life and her time to nobler
cares. She is ignorant of or disdains that excessive cleanliness of body which
soils the soul. Sophie is much more than clean. She is pure.
I said that Sophie was a glutton. She was naturally so. But she became moderate
through habit, and now she is so through virtue. The case is not the same for girls
as for boys, whom one can govern by gluttony up to a certain point. This
inclination is not inconsequential for the fair sex. It is too dangerous to be left
unchecked. When little Sophie went into her mother's cupboard as a child, she did
not always come back empty-handed, and her fidelity was not above every temptation
so far as sugarplums and bonbons were concerned. Her mother surprised her, scolded
her, punished her, and compelled her to fast. She finally succeeded in persuading
Sophie that bonbons spoil the teeth and that eating too much fattens the figure.
Thus Sophie mended her ways. In growing up, she acquired other tastes which
diverted her from this base sensuality. In women as in men, as soon as the heart
becomes animated, gluttony is no longer a dominant vice. Sophie has preserved the
taste proper to her sex. She loves dairy products and sugared things. She loves
pastry and sweets but has very little taste for meat. She has never tasted either
wine or hard liquor. Moreover, she eats very moderate amounts of everything. Her
sex, which is less laborious than ours, has less need of restoratives. In all
things she loves what is good and knows how to appreciate it. She also knows how to
accommodate herself to what is not good without this privation being painful to
her.
Sophie has a mind that is agreeable without being brilliant, and solid without
being profound—a mind about which people do not say any-
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EMILE
thing, because they never find in it either more or less than what they find in
their own minds. She has a mind which always pleases people who speak with her,
although it is not ornamented according to the idea we have of the cultivation of
women's minds; for hers is formed not by reading but only by the conversations of
her father and mother, by her own reflections, and by the observations she has made
in the little bit of the world she has seen. Gaiety is natural to Sophie; she was
even frolicsome in her childhood, but her mother took care to repress her dizzy
moods little by little, lest too sudden a change would give her instruction in the
circumstance which made the repression necessary. She has therefore become modest
and reserved even before the time to be so; and now that this time has come, it is
easier for her to maintain the tone she has acquired than it would be for her to
adopt it without an indication of the reason for this change. It is amusing to see
her, due to a remnant of habit, abandon herself sometimes to childhood vivacities,
and then suddenly come back to herself, become silent, lower her eyes, and blush.
The intermediate stage between the two ages has to partake a bit of both.
Sophie's sensitivity is too great for her to preserve a perfect stability of
disposition, but she is too gentle for that sensitivity to importune others very
much; she harms only herself. Let one word which wounds her be spoken—she does not
pout, but her heart swells. She tries to get away to cry. In the midst of her
tears, let her father or her mother recall her and say one word, and she comes
immediately to play and laugh while adroitly drying her tears and trying to stifle
her sobs.
Nor is she entirely exempt from caprice. Her disposition, which is a bit too
intense, degenerates into refractoriness, and then she is likely to forget herself.
But leave her time to come back to herself, and her way of blotting out her wrong
will almost make a merit of it. If she is punished, she is docile and submissive,
and one sees that her shame comes not so much from the punishment as from the
offense. If nothing is ever said to her, she will not fail to make amends for her
offense herself, and so frankly and with such good grace that it is impossible to
bear a grudge against her. She would kiss the ground before the lowliest domestic
without this abasement causing her the least discomfort; and as soon as she is
pardoned, her joy and her caresses show what a weight has been removed from her
good heart. In a word, she suffers the wrongs of others with patience and makes
amends for her own with pleasure. Such is the lovable nature of her sex before we
have spoiled it. Woman is made to yield to man and to endure even his injustice.
You will never reduce young boys to the same point. The inner sentiment in them
rises and revolts against injustice. Nature did not constitute them to tolerate it.
gravem Pelidae stomachum cedere nescii.™
Sophie is religious, but her religion is reasonable and simple, with little dogma
and less in the way of devout practices—or, rather, she knows no essential practice
other than morality, and she devotes her
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BOOK V
entire life to serving God by doing good. In all the instructions her parents have
given her on this subject, they have accustomed her to a respectful submission by
always saying to her, "My daughter, this knowledge is not for your age. Your
husband will instruct you in it when the time comes." For the rest, instead of long
speeches about piety, they are content to preach piety to her by their example, and
that example is engraved on her heart.
Sophie loves virtue. This love has become her dominant passion. She loves it
because there is nothing so fine as virtue. She loves it because virtue constitutes
woman's glory and because to her a virtuous woman appears almost equal to the
angels. She loves it as the only route of true happiness and because she sees only
misery, abandonment, un-happiness, and ignominy in the life of a shameless woman.
She loves it, finally, as a thing that is dear to her respectable father and to her
tender and worthy mother. They are not content with being happy because of their
own virtue; they also want to be happy because of hers, and her chief happiness for
herself is the hope of causing theirs. All these sentiments inspire in her an
enthusiasm which lifts her soul and keeps all her petty inclinations subjected to
so noble a passion. Sophie will be chaste and decent until her last breath. She has
sworn it in the depth of her soul, and she has sworn it at a time when she already
senses all that it costs to keep such an oath. She has sworn it at a time when she
would have had to revoke the commitment if her senses were made to reign over her.
Sophie does not have the good fortune to be an amiable French woman, cold by
temperament and coquettish by vanity, who wants to shine more than to please, and
who seeks entertainment and not pleasure. The need to love by itself devours her.
It comes to distract her and trouble her heart at festivals. She has lost her
former gaiety; frolicsome games no longer suit her. Far from fearing the boredom of
solitude, she seeks it. She thinks of him who is going to make solitude sweet for
her. All men to whom she is indifferent importune her; she wants not a courtship
but a lover. She would rather please a single decent man—and please him forever—
than gain the acclaim of the fashionable which lasts one day and then changes into
jeers the next.
Women's judgment is formed earlier than men's. Since almost from infancy women are
on the defensive and entrusted with a treasure that is difficult to protect, good
and evil are necessarily known to them sooner. Sophie, who is precocious in
everything because her temperament inclines her to be so, also has had her judgment
formed sooner than other girls her age. There is nothing very extraordinary about
that. Maturity is not everywhere the same at the same time.
Sophie is knowledgeable about the duties and rights of her sex and of ours. She
knows the failings of men and the vices of women. She also knows the corresponding
good qualities and virtues and has engraved them all in the depths of her heart. No
one could have a higher idea of the decent woman than the idea she has conceived.
And this idea does not dismay her; rather, she thinks with more satisfaction of the
decent man, the man of merit; she feels that she is made for that man, that she is
worthy of him, that she can return to him the happiness she will re-
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ceive from him. She feels that she will surely know how to recognize him. The only
problem is finding him.
Women are the natural judges of men's merit as men are of women's merit. That is
their reciprocal right, and neither men nor women are ignorant of it. Sophie knows
she has this right and makes use of it, but with the modesty suitable to her youth,
her inexperience, and her position. She judges only things within her reach, and
she judges only when it serves to develop some useful maxim. She speaks of those
who are absent only with the greatest circumspection, especially if they are women.
She thinks that what makes women slanderous and satirical is to speak of their own
sex. So long as they limit themselves to speaking of ours, they are only equitable.
Sophie, therefore, limits herself to that. As for women, she never speaks about
them except to say the good things about them which she knows. It is an honor she
believes she owes to her own sex. And as for those about whom she knows nothing
good to say, she says nothing at all—and what that means is clear.
Sophie has little experience of the practices of society, but she is obliging and
attentive, and she puts grace in everything she does. A happy nature serves her
better than would a great deal of art. She has a certain politeness of her own
which does not depend on formulas. This politeness is not enslaved to fashions nor
does it change with them; it does nothing on the basis of custom but comes from a
true desire to please—and it does please. She is not acquainted with the trivial
compliments, and she invents none that are more studied. She does not say that she
is very obliged, that one does her great honor, that one should not take the
trouble, etc. Still less does she take it into her head to turn phrases. She
responds to an attention or to an act of routine politeness with a curtsey or a
simple "thank you," but from her mouth that expression is well worth any other. In
response to a true service, she lets her heart speak, and it is not a compliment
that it finds. She has never allowed French customs to enslave her to the yoke of
affectations —such as, when passing from one room to the next, placing her hand on
the arm of a sexagenarian whom she would very much like to support. When an
affected gallant offers her this impertinent service, she announces that she is not
crippled and, leaving the officious fellow, bounds up the stairs and into the room
with two leaps. In fact, although she is not tall, she has never wanted high heels.
She has feet small enough to do without them.
She is quiet and respectful not only with women, but even with men married or men
much older than she is. She will never accept a place above them except out of
obedience, and she will resume her own below them as soon as she can. For she knows
that the rights of age go before those of sex, since they have in their favor the
prejudice of wisdom, which ought to be honored before everything else.
With young people of her own age, it is another matter. She needs a different tone
to command respect from them, and she knows how to adopt it without abandoning the
modest manner suitable to her. If they are modest and reserved themselves, she will
gladly maintain with them the amiable familiarity of youth. Their conversations,
full of in-
[398]
BOOK V
nocence, will be bantering but decent. If they become serious, she wants them to be
useful. If they degenerate into insipidity, she will soon make them stop, for she
especially despises the petty jargon of gallantry, which she regards as very
offensive to her sex. She knows that the man she seeks does not use that jargon,
and she never willingly tolerates from another man anything that does not suit the
one whose character is imprinted in the depth of her heart. The high opinion she
has of the rights of her sex, the pride of soul which the purity of her sentiments
gives her, that energy of virtue which she feels in herself and which makes her
respectable in her own eyes—all cause her to hear with indignation the sugary
remarks intended for her entertainment. She receives them not with an evident anger
but with a disconcerting, ironical approval or an unexpectedly cold tone. Let a
fair Phoebus:u retail his kindnesses to her, cleverly praise her for her
cleverness, for her beauty, for her graces, for the reward of happiness that comes
from pleasing her; she is the girl to interrupt him politely and say, "Monsieur, I
am very much afraid I know all those things better than you do. If we have nothing
less banal to say, I believe we can terminate the conversation here." To accompany
these words with a full curtsey and then be twenty steps from him is the matter of
only an instant. Ask your pleasing little fellows if it is easy to display their
chitchat to a mind as prickly as this one.
It is not the case that she lacks a strong love of praise, provided that it is the
real thing and she can believe that the good which is said of her is actually
thought. To appear touched by her merit, it is necessary to begin by showing that
one has some oneself. A homage founded on esteem can flatter her haughty heart, but
all gallant persiflage is always rebuffed. Sophie is not constituted to give
exercise to the small talents of a clown.
Possessing so great a maturity of judgment and full-grown in all respects like a
girl of twenty, Sophie at fifteen will not be treated as a child by her parents. As
soon as they perceive the first restlessness of youth in her, they will hasten to
provide against it before it develops any further. They will make tender and
sensible speeches to her. Tender and sensible speeches are suitable to her age and
her character. If that character is such as I imagine it, why would her father not
speak to her pretty much as follows:
"Sophie, you are a big girl now, and it is not for the purpose of remaining a big
girl forever that you have become one. We want you to be happy. It is for our sake
that we want it, because our happiness depends on yours. The happiness of a decent
girl lies in causing the happiness of a decent man. You must therefore think about
getting married. You must think about it early, for the destiny of life depends on
marriage, and there is never too much time to think about it.
"Nothing is more difficult than the choice of a good husband, unless it is perhaps
the choice of a good wife. Sophie, you will be that rare woman, you will be the
glory of our life and the happiness of our old age. But no matter how much merit
you possess, the earth is not lacking in men who have still greater merit than you
do. There is no
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man who ought not to be honored to get you; there are many who would honor you even
more. The issue is to find among this number one who suits you, to know him, and to
make yourself known to him.
"The greatest happiness of marriage depends on so many kinds of suitability that it
is folly to want to obtain all of them together. It is necessary first to secure
the most important ones. If the others happen to be there, one takes advantage of
them; if they are lacking, one does without them. Perfect happiness is not of this
earth, but the greatest unhappiness, and the one that can always be avoided, is
being unhappy due to one's own fault.
"Some kinds of suitability are natural, others come from convention, and some
depend only on opinion. Parents are the judges of the two latter kinds. Children
alone are the judges of the former. Marriages made by the authority of fathers are
guided uniquely by the suitability of convention and by that of opinion. It is not
persons who are married; it is positions and wealth. But those things can change.
The persons alone always remain, wherever the couple may go. In spite of fortune,
it is only as a result of personal relations that a marriage can be happy or
unhappy.
"Your mother had position. I was rich. These were the only considerations which led
our parents to unite us. I lost my wealth. She lost her name and was forgotten by
her family. Of what use is it to her today to have been born a lady? In our
disasters the union of our hearts consoled us for everything. The similarity of our
tastes caused us to choose this retreat. We live here happily in poverty. We take
the place of everything else for each other. Sophie is our common treasure. We
bless heaven for having given us this and taken away all the rest. See, my child,
where providence has led us! The kinds of suitability which caused us to be married
have vanished. We are happy due only to those that were counted for nothing.
"It is up to the spouses to match themselves. Mutual inclination ought to be their
first bond. Their eyes and their hearts ought to be their first guides. Their first
duty once they are united is to love each other; and since loving or not loving is
not within our control, this duty necessarily involves another, which is to begin
by loving each other before being united. This is the right of nature, which
nothing can abrogate. Those who have hindered it by so many civil laws have paid
more attention to the appearance of order than to the happiness of marriage and the
morals of citizens. You see, my Sophie, that we are not preaching a difficult
morality to you. It leads only to making you your own mistress and having us rely
on you for the choice of your husband.
"After having told you our reasons for leaving you entirely at liberty, it is just
that we also speak to you about the reasons why you should use this liberty wisely.
My daughter, you are good and reasonable, you have rectitude and piety, you have
talents which suit decent women, and you are not unendowed with attractions. But
you are poor. You have the most estimable goods, and you lack only those which are
most esteemed. Therefore, aspire only to what you can get, and guide your ambition
not by your judgments nor by ours, but by the opinion of
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BOOK V
men. If it were only a question of an equality of merit, I do not know any limit
that I ought to put on your hopes. But do not raise them above your fortune, and do
not forget that it is of the lowest rank. Although a man worthy of you would not
count this inequality as an obstacle, you ought to do what he will not do. Sophie
ought to imitate her mother, and enter only into a family which considers itself
honored by her. You did not see our opulence; you were born during our poverty. You
make that poverty sweet for us, and you share it without difficulty. Believe me,
Sophie, do not seek goods that we bless heaven for having delivered us from. We
have tasted happiness only after having lost our riches.
"You are too lovable to please no one, and your poverty is not so great that a
decent man would be embarrassed by you. You will be sought after, possibly by
people who are not worthy of you. If they revealed themselves to you as they are,
you would esteem them for what they are worth; all their pomp would not impress you
for long. But although you have good judgment and you know what merit is, you lack
experience and you are ignorant of the extent to which men can counterfeit
themselves. A skillful faker can study your tastes in order to seduce you and feign
virtues in your presence which he does not have. He would ruin you before you were
aware of it, Sophie, and when you recognized your error, you would only be able to
weep for it. The most dangerous of all traps, and the only one reason cannot avoid,
is that of the senses. If you ever have the misfortune of falling into this trap,
you will no longer see anything but illusions and chimeras; your eyes will be
fascinated, your judgment clouded, your will corrupted. Your very error will be
dear to you, and even if you were in a condition to recognize it, you would not
want to recover from it. My daughter, it is to Sophie's reason that I entrust you;
I do not entrust you to the inclination of her heart. So long as your blood is
cool, remain your own judge. But as soon as you are in love, return yourself to
your mother's care.
"I propose an agreement which is a mark of our esteem for you and re-establishes
the natural order among us. Parents choose the husband of their daughter and
consult her only for the sake of form. Such is the usual practice. We shall do
exactly the opposite. You will choose, and we will be consulted. Use your right,
Sophie; use it freely and wisely. The husband who suits you ought to be of your
choice and not of ours. But it is for us to judge whether you are mistaken
concerning this suitability and whether, without knowing it, you do something other
than what you want. Birth, wealth, rank, and opinion will in no way enter in our
decision. Take a decent man whose person pleases you and whose character suits you;
whatever else he is, we will accept him as our son-in-law. His wealth will always
be great enough if he can use his arms to work and if he has morals and loves his
family. His rank will always be illustrious enough if he ennobles it by virtue. If
the whole world should blame us, what difference does it make? We do not seek
public approval. Your happiness is enough for us."
Readers, I do not know what effect a similar speech would have on girls raised in
your way. As for Sophie, it is possible she will not respond
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EMILE
with words. Shame and tenderness would not easily let her express herself. But I am
quite sure that such a speech will remain engraved on her heart for the rest of her
life, and that if one can count on any human resolution, it is on her heartfelt
resolution to be worthy of her parents' esteem.
Let us take the worst case and give her an ardent temperament which makes a long
wait painful for her. I say that her judgment, her knowledge, her taste, her
delicacy, and especially the sentiments on which her heart has been fed in her
childhood will oppose to the impetuosity of her senses a counterweight sufficient
to vanquish them or at least to resist them for a long time. She would rather die a
martyr to her condition than afflict her parents, wed a man without merit, and
expose herself to the unhappiness of an ill-matched marriage. The very liberty she
has received has the effect only of giving her a new elevation of soul and making
her harder to please in the choice of her master. Possessing the temperament of an
Italian woman and the sensitivity of an Englishwoman, Sophie combines with them—in
order to control her heart and her senses—the pride of a Spanish woman, who, even
when she is seeking a lover, does not easily find one she esteems worthy of her.
It does not belong to everyone to feel what a source of energy the love of decent
things can give the soul and what force one can find within oneself when one wants
to be sincerely virtuous. There are people to whom everything great appears
chimerical, and who in their base and vile reasoning will never know what effect
even a mania for virtue can have upon the human passions. To these people one must
speak only with examples; so much the worse for them if they persist in denying
these examples. If I said to them that Sophie is not an imaginary being, that her
name alone is of my invention, that her education, her morals, her character, and
even her looks have really existed, and that her memory still brings tears to every
member of a decent family, they undoubtedly would believe nothing of it. None-
. theless, what would I risk in straightforwardly completing the history of a girl
so similar to Sophie that her story could be Sophie's without occasioning any
surprise? Whether it is believed to be true or not, it makes little difference. I
shall, if you please, have told fictions, but I shall still have explicated my
method, and I shall still be pursuing my ends. The young person with the
temperament I have just given to Sophie also resembled her in all the ways which
could make her merit the name, and I shall continue to call her by it. After the
conversation I have reported, her father and her mother, judging that eligible men
would not come to offer themselves in the hamlet where they lived, sent her
. to spend a winter in the city at the home of an aunt, who was secretly informed
of the purpose of this trip. For the haughty Sophie carried in the depth of her
heart a noble pride in knowing how to triumph over herself; and whatever need she
had of a husband, she would die a maiden rather than resolve to look for one.
To fulfill the intentions of Sophie's parents, her aunt presented her in homes,
took her out to groups and parties, and made her see society
[402]
BOOK V
—or rather made society see her, for Sophie cared little for all this bustle. It
was noted, however, that she did not flee young people with agreeable appearances
who appeared decent and modest. In her very reserve, she had a certain art of
attracting them which rather resembled coquetry. But after having conversed with
them two or three times, she gave up. She soon substituted for that air of
authority which seems to accept homages a more humble bearing and a more forbidding
politeness. Always attentive to herself, she no longer gave them the occasion to do
her the least service. This was an adequate way of saying she did not want to be
their beloved.
Sensitive hearts never like boisterous pleasures, the vain and sterile happiness of
people who feel nothing and who believe that to numb one's life is to enjoy it.
Sophie had not found what she was seeking and, despairing of finding it in this
way, she became bored by the city. She loved her parents tenderly; nothing
compensated her for their absence, nothing was able to make her forget them. She
went back to join them long before the date fixed for her return.
She hadthardly resumed her functions in her parents' household before it was
observed that, although she maintained the same conduct, her disposition had
changed. She had moments of distraction and impatience; she was sad and dreamy; she
hid herself in order to cry. At first they believed she was in love and was ashamed
of it. They spoke to her about it; she denied it. She protested that she had seen
no one who could touch her heart, and Sophie did not lie.
However, her languor constantly increased, and her health began to deteriorate. Her
mother, upset by this change, finally resolved to find out its cause. She took
Sophie aside and set to work on her with that winning language and those invincible
caresses that only maternal tenderness knows how to employ. "My daughter, you whom
I carried in my womb and whom I unceasingly carry in my heart, pour out the secrets
of your heart on your mother's bosom. What are these secrets that a mother cannot
know? Who pities your troubles? Who shares them? Who wants to relieve them, if not
your father and mother? Ah, my child, do you want me to die of your pain without
knowing what it is?"
Far from hiding her chagrins from her mother, the young girl asked for nothing
better than to have her as a consoler and confidant. But shame prevented Sophie
from speaking, and her modesty found no language to describe a condition so little
worthy of her as the emotion which was disturbing her senses in spite of herself.
Finally, her very shame served her mother as an indication, and she drew out these
humiliating admissions from her daughter. Far from afflicting Sophie with unjust
reprimands, her mother consoled her, pitied her, cried for her. She was too wise to
make a crime out of an ill that Sophie's virtue alone made so cruel. But why endure
without necessity an ill for which the remedy was so easy and so legitimate? Why
did she not make use of the freedom she had been given? Why did she not accept a
husband, why did she not choose -one? Did she not know that her fate depended on
herself alone, and that, whomever she chose, he would
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EMILE
be approved, since she could not choose a man who was not decent? She had been sent
to the city. She had not wanted to remain. Several eligible men had presented
themselves; she had rebuffed them all. What was she waiting for, then? What did she
want? What an inexplicable contradiction!
The answer was simple. If she had only to find someone to help satisfy youthful
needs, the choice would soon be made. But a master for the whole of life is not so
easy to choose. And since these two choices cannot be separated, a girl must simply
wait, and often lose her youth before finding the man with whom she wants to spend
all the days of her life. Such was Sophie's case. She needed a lover, but that
lover had to be a husband; and given the heart needed to match hers, the former was
almost as difficult to find as the latter. All these glamorous young people were
suitable to her only from the point of view of age; they always failed to suit her
in all other ways. Their superficial minds, their vanity, their jargon, their
unruly morals, and their frivolous imitations disgusted her. She sought a man and
found only monkeys; she sought a soul and found none.
"How unhappy I am!" she said to her mother. "I need to love, and I see nothing
pleasing to me. My heart rejects all those who attract my senses. I see not one who
does not excite my desires, and not one who does not repel my desires. An
attraction that is not accompanied by esteem cannot endure. Ah, that is not the man
for your Sophie! The charming model of the man for her is imprinted too deeply on
her soul. She can love only him; she can make only him happy; she can be happy with
him alone. She prefers to pine away and do constant battle; she prefers to die
unhappy and free rather than in despair with a man she does not love and whom she
would make unhappy. It is better no longer to exist than to exist only to suffer."
Struck by this singular discourse, her mother found it too bizarre not to suspect
some mystery. Sophie was neither affected nor silly. How had this extravagant
delicacy been able to take root in her—she who had been taught from her childhood
nothing so much as to adjust herself to the people with whom she had to live and to
make a virtue of necessity? This model of the lovable man with which she was so
enchanted and which returned so often in all her conversations caused her mother to
conjecture that this caprice had some other foundation of which she was still
ignorant, and that Sophie had not told all. The unfortunate girl, oppressed by her
secret pain, sought only to unburden herself. Her mother pressed. Sophie hesitated;
she finally yielded, and, going out without saying anything, returned a moment
later with a book in her hand. "Pity your unhappy daughter. Her sadness is without
remedy. Her tears will never dry up. You want to know the cause. Well, here it is,"
she said, throwing the book on the table. The mother took the book and opened it.
It was The Adventures of Telemachus.:i-At first she understood nothing of this
enigma. But by dint of questions and obscure answers, she finally saw, with a
surprise that is easy to conceive, that her daughter was the rival of Eucharis.:w
Sophie loved Telemachus and loved him with a passion of which
[404]
BOOK V
nothing could cure her. As soon as her father and her mother knew of her mania,
they laughed about it and believed they would bring her around by reason. They were
mistaken. Reason was not entirely on their side. Sophie also had her own reason and
knew how to turn it to account. How many times she reduced them to silence by using
their own reasoning again them, by showing them that they had done all the harm
themselves: that they had not formed her for a man of her times; that she would
necessarily have to adopt her husband's ways of thinking or convert him to her own;
that they had made the first means impossible by the way they had raised her, and
that the other was precisely what she was seeking. "Give me," she said, "a man
imbued with my maxims or one whom I can bring around to them, and I shall marry
him. But until then, why do you scold me? Pity me. I am unhappy, not mad. Does the
heart depend on the will? Didn't my father say so himself? Is it my fault if I love
what does not exist? I am not a visionary. I do not want a prince. I do not seek
Telemachus. I know that he is only a fiction. I seek someone who resembles him. And
why cannot this someone exist, since I exist—I who feel within myself a heart so
similar to his? No, let us not thus dishonor humanity. Let us not think that a
lovable and virtuous man is only a chimera. He exists; he lives; perhaps he is
seeking me. He seeks a soul that knows how to love him. But what sort of man is he?
Where is he? I do not know. He is none of those I have seen. Doubtless he is none
of those I shall see. O my mother, why have you made virtue too lovable for me? If
I can love nothing but virtue, the fault is less mine than yours."
Shall I bring this sad narrative to its catastrophic end? Shall I tell of the long
disputes which preceded the catastrophe? Shall I portray an exasperated mother
exchanging her earlier caresses for harshness? Shall I show an irritated father
forgetting his earlier agreements and treating the most virtuous of daughters like
a madwoman? Shall I, finally, depict the unfortunate girl—even more attached to her
chimera as a result of the persecution she has suffered for it—going with slow
steps toward death and descending into the grave at the moment when they believe
they are leading her to the altar? No, I put aside these dreadful objects. I need
not go so far to show by what seems to me a sufficiently striking example that, in
spite of the prejudices born of the morals of our age, enthusiasm for the decent
and the fine is no more foreign to women than to men, and that there is nothing
that cannot be obtained under nature's direction from women as well as from men.
Here someone will stop me and ask whether it is nature which prescribes our
expending so much effort for the repression of immoderate desires? My answer is no,
but it also is not nature which gives us so many immoderate desires. Now,
everything that is not nature is against nature. I have proved that countless
times.
Let us render his Sophie to our Emile. Let us resuscitate this lovable girl to give
her a less lively imagination and a happier destiny. I wanted to depict an ordinary
woman, and by dint of elevating her soul I have disturbed her reason. I went astray
myself. Let us retrace our
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EMILE
steps. Sophie has only a good nature in a common soul. Every advantage she has
over other women is the effect of her education.
<---------------------------------------»
I proposed to say in this book all that can be done and to leave to the reader the
choice—among the good things I may have said—of those that are within his reach. I
had thought at the beginning that I would form Emile's companion at the outset and
raise them for and with each other. But on reflection I found that all these
arrangements were too premature and ill conceived, and that it was absurd to
destine two children to be united before being able to know whether this union was
in the order of nature and whether they had between them the compatibilities
suitable for forming it. One must not confound what is natural in the savage state
with what is natural in the civil state. In the former state all women are suitable
for all men because both still have only the primitive and common form. In the
latter, since each character is developed by social institutions and each mind has
received its peculiar and determinate form not from education alone but from the
well-ordered or ill-ordered conjunction of nature and education, men and women can
no longer be matched except by presenting them to one another in order to see
whether they suit one another in all respects— or at least in order to determine
the choice resulting in the greatest degree of suitability.
The trouble is that as the social state develops characters, it distinguishes
ranks, and since the order based on character is different from the order based on
rank, the more one distinguishes among classes, the more one blurs the distinctions
among characters. The consequences are ill-matched marriages and all the disorders
deriving from them. From this one sees, by an evident inference, that the farther
we are removed from equality, the more our natural sentiments are corrupted; the
more the gap between noble and commoner widens, the more the conjugal bond is
relaxed; and the more there are rich and poor, the less there are fathers and
husbands. Neither master nor slave any longer has a family; each of the two sees
only his status.
Do you wish to prevent such abuses and to promote happy marriages? Stifle
prejudices, forget human institutions, and consult nature. Do not unite people who
suit each other only in a given condition and who will no longer suit one another
if this condition happens to change; instead, unite people who will suit one
another in whatever situation they find themselves, in whatever country they
inhabit, in whatever rank they may wind up. I do not say that compatibilities based
on convention are immaterial in marriage, but I do say that the influence of
natural compatibilities is so much more important that it alone is decisive for the
fate of married life. There is a suitability of tastes, dispositions, sentiments,
and characters which ought to engage a wise father—were he a prince or a monarch—to
give to his son without hesitation the girl who would suit him in all these
respects, were she born of a dishonorable family, were she the daughter of the
hangman. Yes, I maintain that even if all the misfortunes imaginable were to fall
[406]
BOOK V
upon a well-united couple, they would enjoy a truer happiness in weeping together
than they would have if their enjoyment of all the good fortune in the world were
poisoned by the disunion of their hearts.
Instead of determining a wife for my Emile from childhood, I have therefore waited
to know the one who will suit him. It is not I who make this determination; it is
nature. My job is to find out the choice that nature has made. I say my job and not
that of Emile's father, for in confiding his son to me he yields his place to me,
and he substitutes my right for his. I am Emile's true father; I made him a man. I
would have refused to raise him if I had not been the master of marrying him to the
woman of his choice—that is, of my choice. Only the pleasure of making a happy man
can pay for what it costs to put him in a position to become happy.
Nor should you believe that I waited until I gave Emile the responsibility of
looking for a wife before I found her. This feigned search is only a pretext for
making him learn about women, so that he will sense the value of the one who suits
him. For a long time Sophie has been found. Perhaps Emile has already seen her. But
he will recognize her only when it is time.
Although equality of status is not necessary to marriage, when this equality is
joined to the other kinds of suitability, it gives them a new value. It is not
weighed against any of them, but it tips the scale when all else is equal.
Unless he is a monarch, a man cannot seek a woman in every class, for the
prejudices he himself does not have he will find in others, and a certain girl who
would perhaps suit him might nonetheless be unattainable for him. Thus there are
maxims of prudence that ought to limit the search of a judicious father. He should
not want to establish his pupil above his rank, for that is not within the father's
control. Even if he could, he still should not want to, for what difference does
rank make to a young man—at least my young man? Moreover, by climbing in rank he
exposes himself to countless real ills which he will sense for his whole life. I
even say that he should not want to trade off goods of different natures, like
nobility and money, for what is gained by each is less than what it loses in the
exchange. Furthermore, there is never agreement between the two parties about the
value of what each has contributed. Finally, the preference each gives to his own
contribution prepares the way for discord between the two families, and often
between the two spouses.
It also makes a great difference for the good order of the marriage whether the man
makes an alliance above or below himself. The former case is entirely contrary to
reason; the latter is more conformable to it. Since the family is connected with
society only by its head, the position of the head determines that of the entire
family. When he makes an alliance in a lower rank, he does not descend, he raises
up his wife. On the other hand, by taking a woman above him, he lowers her without
raising himself. Thus, in the first case there is good without bad, and in the
second bad without good. Moreover, it is part of the order of nature that the woman
obey the man. Therefore, when he takes her from a lower rank, the natural and the
civil order agree, and everything goes
[407]
EMILE
well. The contrary is the case when the man allies himself with a woman above him
and thereby faces the alternative of curbing either his rights or his gratitude and
of being either ungrateful or despised. Then the woman, pretending to authority,
acts as a tyrant toward the head of the house, and the master becomes a slave and
finds himself the most ridiculous and most miserable of creatures. Such are those
unfortunate favorites whom the Asian kings honor and torment by marrying them to
their daughters, and who are said to dare to approach only from the foot of the bed
in order to sleep with their wives.
I expect that many readers, remembering that I ascribe to woman a natural talent
for governing man, will accuse me of a contradiction here. They will, however, be
mistaken. There is quite a difference between arrogating to oneself the right to
command and governing him who commands. Woman's empire is an empire of gentleness,
skill, and obligingness; her orders are caresses, her threats are tears. She ought
to reign in the home as a minister does in a state—by getting herself commanded to
do what she wants to do. In this sense, the best households are invariably those
where the woman has the most authority. But when she fails to recognize the voice
of the head of the house, when she wants to usurp his rights and be in command
herself, the result of this disorder is never anything but misery, scandal, and
dishonor.
There remains the choice between one's equals and one's inferiors; and I believe
that some restriction must be placed upon the latter, for it is difficult to find
among the dregs of the people a wife capable of making a gentleman happy. It is not
that they are more vicious in the lowest rank than in the highest, but that they
have few ideas of what is beautiful and decent, and that the injustice of the other
estates makes the lowest see justice in its very vices.
By nature man hardly thinks. To think is an art he learns like all the others and
with even more difficulty. In regard to relations between the two sexes, I know of
only two classes which are separated by a real distinction—one composed of people
who think, the other of people who do not think; and this difference comes almost
entirely from education. A man from the first of these two classes ought not to
make an alliance in the other, for the greatest charm of society is lacking to him
when, despite having a wife, he is reduced to thinking alone. People who literally
spend their whole lives working in order to live have no idea other than that of
their work or their self-interest, and their whole mind seems to be at the end of
their arms. This ignorance harms neither probity nor morals. Often it even serves
them. Often one compromises in regard to one's duties by dint of reflecting on them
and ends up replacing real things with abstract talk. Conscience is the most
enlightened of philosophers. One does not need to know Cicero's Offices to be a
good man, and the most decent woman in the world perhaps has the least knowledge of
what decency is. But it is no less true that only a cultivated mind makes
association agreeable, and it is a sad thing for a father of a family who enjoys
himself in his home to be forced to close himself up and not be able to make
himself understood by anyone.
Besides, how will a woman who has no habit of reflecting raise her
[408]
BOOK V
children? How will she discern what suits them? How will she incline them toward
virtues she does not know, toward merit of which she has no idea? She will know
only how to flatter or threaten them, to make them insolent or fearful. She will
make mannered monkeys or giddy rascals of them, never good minds or lovable
children.
Therefore, it is not suitable for a man with education to take a wife who has none,
or, consequently, to take a wife from a rank in which she could not have an
education. But I would still like a simple and coarsely raised girl a hundred times
better than a learned and brilliant one who would come to establish in my house a
tribunal of literature over which she would preside. A brilliant wife is a plague
to her husband, her children, her friends, her valets, everyone. From the sublime
elevation of her fair genius she disdains all her woman's duties and always begins
by making herself into a man after the fashion of Mademoiselle de l'Enclos. Outside
her home she is always ridiculous and very justly criticized; this is the
inevitable result as soon as one leaves one's station and is not fit for the
station one wants to adopt. All these women of great talent never impress anyone
but fools. It is always known who the artist or the friend is who holds the pen or
the brush when they work. It is known who the discreet man of letters is who
secretly dictates their oracles to them. All this charlatanry is unworthy of a
decent woman. Even if she had some true talents, her pretensions would debase them.
Her dignity consists in her being ignored. Her glory is in her husband's esteem.
Her pleasures are in the happiness of her family. Readers, I leave it to you.
Answer in good faith. What gives you a better opinion of a woman on entering her
room, what makes you approach her with more respect—to see her occupied with the
labors of her sex and the cares of her household, encompassed by her children's
things, or to find her at her dressing table writing verses, surrounded by all
sorts of pamphlets and letters written on tinted paper? Every literary maiden would
remain a maiden for her whole life if there were only sensible men in this world:
Quaeris cur nolim te ducere, Galla? diserta es.:u
After these considerations comes that of looks. It is the first consideration which
strikes one and the last to which one ought to pay attention, but still it should
count for something. Great beauty appears to me to be avoided rather than sought in
marriage. Beauty promptly wears out in possession. After six weeks it is nothing
more for the possessor, but its dangers last as long as it does. Unless a beautiful
woman is an angel, her husband is the unhappiest of men; and even if she were an
angel, how will she prevent his being ceaselessly surrounded by enemies? If extreme
ugliness were not disgusting, I would prefer it to extreme beauty; for in a short
time both are nothing for the husband, and thus beauty becomes a drawback and
ugliness an advantage. But ugliness which produces disgust is the greatest of
misfortunes. This sentiment, far from fading away, increases constantly and turns
into hatred. Such a marriage is a hell. It would be better to be dead than to be
thus united.
[409]
EMILE
Desire mediocrity in everything, without excepting even beauty. An attractive and
prepossessing face that inspires not love but benevolence is what one ought to
prefer. It is not prejudicial to the husband, and its advantages contribute to the
profit of both. Graces do not wear out like beauty. They have life, they are
constantly renewed, and at the end of thirty years of marriage a decent woman with
graces pleases her husband as she did on the first day.
Such are the reflections which have determined me on the choice of Sophie. She is a
pupil of nature just as Emile is, and she, more than any other, is made for him.
She will be the woman of the man. She is his equal in birth and merit, his inferior
in fortune. She does not enchant at first glance, but she pleases more each day.
Her greatest charm acts only by degrees. It unfolds only in the intimacy of
association, and her husband will sense it more than anyone in the world. Her
education is neither brilliant nor neglected. She has taste without study, talents
without art, judgment without knowledge. Her mind does not know, but it is
cultivated for learning; it is a well-prepared soil that only awaits seed in order
to bear fruit. She has read no other books than Barreme 3r' and Telemachus, which
fell into her hands by chance. But does a girl capable of becoming impassioned
about Telemachus have a heart without sentiment and a mind without delicacy? O what
lovable ignorance! Happy is he who is destined to instruct her. She will be not her
husband's teacher but his pupil. Far from wanting to subject him to her tastes, she
will adopt his. She is better for him as she is than if she were learned: he will
have the pleasure of teaching her everything. It is finally time that they see each
other. Let us work to bring them together.
We are sad and dreamy as we leave Paris. This city of chatter is not the place for
us. Emile turns a disdainful eye toward this great city and says resentfully, "How
many days lost in vain searches! Ah, the wife of my heart is not there. My friend,
you knew it well. But my time scarcely costs you anything, and my ills cause you
little suffering." I give him a fixed look and say, without getting aroused, "Do
you believe what you are saying?" At once, very much embarrassed, he embraces me
and hugs me in his arms without answering. This is always his answer when he is
wrong.
Here we are in the country like true knights-errant, although not seeking
adventures as they do; on the contrary, we flee adventures in leaving Paris. But we
imitate the pace of those knights in our wandering, sometimes proceeding at full
tilt and sometimes meandering. By dint of following my practice, one will have
finally grasped its spirit, and I cannot imagine a reader still so prejudiced by
custom as to suppose us both asleep in a good, well-closed post-chaise, progressing
without seeing or observing anything, making worthless for ourselves the interval
between departure and arrival, and by the speed of our progress wasting time in
order to save it.
Men say that life is short, and I see that they exert themselves to make it so. Not
knowing how to employ it, they complain of the rapidity of time, and I see that it
flows too slowly for their taste. Always occupied with the goal toward which they
are straining, they regard
[410]
BOOK V
with regret the interval separating them from that goal. One man wants it to be
tomorrow, another next month, another ten years from now. None wants to live today.
None is content with the present hour; all find it too slow in passing. When they
complain that time flows too fast, they lie. They would gladly pay for the power to
accelerate it. They would gladly use their fortune to consume their whole lives;
and there is perhaps not a single one who would not have reduced his years to very
few hours if he had been the master of eliminating, at the prompting of his
boredom, those hours which were burdensome to him, and, at the prompting of his
impatience, those hours which separated him from the desired moment. A man spends
half his life going from Paris to Versailles, from Versailles to Paris, from the
city to the country, from the country to the city, and from one part of town to the
next, and he would be very much at a loss about what to do with his hours if he did
not know the secret of wasting them in this way; he purposely goes far away from
his business in order to keep busy going back to it. He believes he gains the extra
time he spends in this way, for otherwise he would not know how to fill it. Or, on
the contrary, he hurries in order to hurry and comes with post-horses for no other
reason than to return in the same way. Mortals, will you never cease to calumniate
nature? Why do you complain that life is short, since it is still not short enough
for your taste? If there is a single one among you who knows how to temper his
desires so that he never wishes for time to pass, he will not regard life as too
short. To live and to enjoy will be the same thing for him, and even if he were to
die young, he would die full with days.
Even if there were only this advantage to my method, it alone would make it
preferable to any other. I have not raised my Emile to desire or to wait but to
enjoy; and when he extends his desires beyond the present, his ardor is not so
impetuous that he is bothered by the slowness of time. He will enjoy not only the
pleasure of desiring but that of going to the object he desires, and his passions
are so moderate that he is always more where he is than where he will be.
Therefore, we travel not like messengers but like travelers. We do not think only
about the departure and the arrival but also about the interval separating them.
The trip itself is a pleasure for us. We do not make it seated sadly, like
prisoners, in a small, closed-up cage. We do not travel in softness and repose, as
women do. We do not deprive ourselves of the fresh air, or the sight of the objects
surrounding us, or the ease of contemplating them at our will when it pleases us.
Emile never enters a post-chaise and does not travel about on post-horses unless he
is in a hurry. But why would Emile ever be in a hurry? For one reason alone—to
enjoy life. Shall I add another—to do good when he can? No, for that itself is to
enjoy life.
I can conceive of only one way of traveling that is more agreeable than going by
horse. That is going by foot. The traveler leaves at his own good time; he stops at
will; he takes as much or as little exercise as he wants. He observes the whole
country; he turns aside to the right or the left; he examines all that appeals to
him; he stops to see all the views. Do I notice a river? I walk along it. A thick
wood? I go beneath
[411]
EMILE
its shade. A grotto? I visit it. A quarry? I examine the minerals. Everywhere I
enjoy myself, I stay. The moment I get bored, I go. I depend on neither horse nor
coachman. I do not need to choose ready-made paths, comfortable roads; I pass
wherever a man can pass. I see all that a man can see; and, depending only on
myself, I enjoy all the liberty a man can enjoy. If bad weather stops me and
boredom overtakes me, then I take horses. If I am weary . . . but Emile hardly gets
weary. He is robust, and why should he get weary? He is not in a hurry. If he
stops, how can he get bored? He carries everywhere the means of enjoying himself.
He enters a master's establishment and works. He exercises his arms to rest his
feet.
To travel on foot is to travel like Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras.:|" It is hard
for me to understand how a philosopher can resolve to travel any other way and tear
himself away from the examination of the riches which he tramples underfoot and
which the earth lavishly offers to his sight. Who that has some liking for
agriculture does not want to know the products peculiar to the climate of the
places he passes through and the way in which they are cultivated? Who that has
some taste for natural history can resolve to pass by a piece of land without
examining it, a boulder without chipping it, mountains without herborizing, stones
without looking for fossils? Your city philosophers learn natural history in
museums; they have gadgets; they know names and have no idea of nature. But Emile's
museum is richer than those of kings; it is the whole earth. Each thing is in its
place. The naturalist in charge has put the whole in very beautiful order;
d'Aubenton :il could not do better.
How many different pleasures are brought together by this agreeable way of
traveling, without counting strengthened health and brightened humor! I have always
observed that those who traveled in good, smooth-riding vehicles were dreamy, sad,
scolding, or ailing, while pedestrians were gay, easygoing, and content with
everything. How the heart laughs when one approaches lodgings! How savory a coarse
meal appears! With what pleasure one rests at the table! What a good sleep one has
in a bad bed! When one wants only to arrive, one can hurry in a post-chaise. But
when one wants to travel, one has to go on foot.
If Sophie is not forgotten before we have gone fifty leagues in the way I imagine,
either I must not be very skillful or Emile must not be very curious; for since
Emile possesses so many kinds of elementary knowledge, it is difficult for him not
to be tempted to go farther in them. One is curious only to the extent that one is
informed. He knows exactly enough to want to learn.
Meanwhile one object attracts us to another, and we always go forward. I have set a
distant goal for our first trip. The pretext for doing so is easy: one has to go a
long way from Paris to look for a wife.
One day, after having strayed more than usual in valleys and mountains where no
path can be perceived, we can no longer find our way again. It makes little
difference to us. All paths are good, provided one arrives. But, still, one has to
arrive somewhere when one is hungry. Happily we find a peasant who takes us to his
cottage. We eat his meager dinner with great appetite. On seeing us so tired and
famished,
[412]
BOOK V
he says to us, "If the good Lord had led you to the other side of the hill, you
would have been better received . . . you would have found a house of peace . . .
such charitable people . . . such good people . . . They are not better-hearted
than I am, but they are richer, although it is said that they were previously much
more so . . . they are not suffering, thank God, and the whole countryside feels
the effects of what remains to them."
At this mention of good people, the good Emile's heart gladdens. "My friend," he
says, looking at me, "let us go to that house whose masters are blessed in the
neighborhood. I would be glad to see them. Perhaps they will be glad to receive us,
too. I am sure they will receive us well. If they are of our kind, we shall be of
theirs."
Having received good directions to the house, we leave and wander through the
woods. On the way heavy rain surprises us. It slows us up without stopping us.
Finally we find our way, and in the evening we arrive at the designated house. In
the hamlet which surrounds it, this house alone, although simple, stands out. We
present ourselves. We ask for hospitality. We are taken to speak to the master. He
questions us, but politely. Without telling him the subject of our trip, we tell
him the reason for our detour. From his former opulence he has retained a facility
for recognizing the station of people by their manners. Whoever has lived in high
society is rarely mistaken about that. On the basis of this passport we are
admitted.
We are shown to a very little, but clean and comfortable apartment. A fire is made.
We find linen, garments, everything we need. "What!" says Emile. "It is as though
we were expected! Oh how right the peasant was! What attention, what goodness, what
foresight! And for unknowns! I believe I am living in Homer's time." "Be sensitive
to all this," I say to him, "but don't be surprised. Wherever strangers are rare,
they are welcome. Nothing makes one more hospitable than seldom needing to be. It
is the abundance of guests which destroys hospitality. In the time of Homer people
hardly traveled, and travelers were well received everywhere. We are perhaps the
only transients who have been seen here during the whole year." "It makes no
difference," he replies. "That itself is praise—to know how to get along without
guests and always to receive them well."
After we have dried ourselves and straightened up, we go to rejoin the master of
the house. He presents his wife to us. She receives us not only politely but with
kindness. The honor of her glances belongs to Emile. A mother in her situation
rarely sees a man of that age enter her home without uneasiness or at least
curiosity.
For our sake they have supper served early. On entering the dining room, we see
five settings. We are seated, but an empty place remains. A girl enters, curtseys
deeply, and sits down modestly without speaking. Emile, busy with his hunger or his
answers, greets her and continues to speak and eat. The principle object of his
trip is as distant from his thoughts as he believes himself to be still distant
from its goal. The discussion turns to the travelers' losing their way. "Sir," the
master of the house says to him, "you appear to me to be a likable and wise young
man, and that makes me think that you and your governor
[413]
EMILE
have arrived here tired and wet like Telemachus and Mentor on Calypso's island."
"It is true," Emile answers, "that we find here the hospitality of Calpyso." His
Mentor adds, "And the charms of Eucharis." 38 But although Emile knows the Odyssey,
he has not read Telemachus. He does not know who Eucharis is. As for the girl, I
see her blush up to her eyes, lower them toward her plate, and not dare to murmur.
Her mother, who notices her embarrassment, gives a sign to her father, and he
changes the subject. In speaking of his solitude, he gradually gets involved in the
story of the events which confined him to it: the misfortunes of his life, the
constancy of his wife, the consolations they have found in their union, the sweet
and peaceful life they lead in their retreat—and still without saying a word about
the girl. All this forms an agreeable and touching story which cannot be heard
without interest. Emile, moved and filled with tenderness, stops eating in order to
listen. Finally, at the part where the most decent of men enlarges with great
pleasure on the attachment of the worthiest of women, the young traveler is beside
himself; with one hand he grips the husband's hand, and with the other he takes the
wife's hand and leans toward it rapturously, sprinkling it with tears. The young
man's naive vivacity enchants everyone, but the girl, more sensitive than anyone to
this mark of his good heart, believes she sees Telemachus affected by
Philoctetes'39 misfortunes. She furtively turns her eyes toward him in order to
examine his face better. She finds nothing there which denies the comparison. His
easy bearing is free without being arrogant. His manners are lively without being
giddy. His sensitivity makes his glance gentler, his expression more touching. The
girl, seeing him cry, is ready to mingle her tears with his. But even with so fair
a pretext, a secret shame restrains her. She already reproaches herself for the
tears about to escape her eyes, as though it were bad to shed them for her family.
Her mother, who from the beginning of the supper has not stopped watching her, sees
her constraint and delivers her from it by sending her on an errand. A minute later
the young girl returns, but she is so little recovered that her disorder is visible
to all eyes. Her mother gently says to her, "Sophie, pull yourself together. Will
you never stop crying over the misfortunes of your parents? You, who console them
for their misfortunes, must not be more sensitive to them than they are
themselves."
At the name Sophie, you would have seen Emile shiver. Struck by so dear a name, he
is wakened with a start and casts an avid glance at the girl who dares to bear it.
"Sophie, O Sophie! Is it you whom my heart seeks? Is it you whom my heart loves?"
He observes her and contemplates her with a sort of fear and distrust. He does not
see exactly the face that he had depicted to himself. He does not know whether the
one he sees is better or worse. He studies each feature; he spies on each movement,
each gesture. In all he finds countless confused interpretations. He would give
half his life for her to be willing to speak a single word. Uneasy and troubled, he
looks at me. His eyes put a hundred questions to me and make a hundred reproaches
all at once. He seems to say to me with each look, "Guide me while there is
U14]
BOOK V
time. If my heart yields and is mistaken, I shall never recover in all my days."
Emile is worse at disguising his feelings than any man in the world. How would he
disguise them in the greatest disturbance of his life, in the presence of four
spectators who examine him and of whom the most distracted in appearance is
actually the most attentive? His disorder does not escape Sophie's penetrating
eyes. Moreover, his eyes teach her that she is the cause of his disorder. She sees
that this appre-hensiveness is not yet love. But what difference does it make? He
is involved with her, and that is enough. She will be most unlucky if he becomes
involved with her with impunity.
Mothers have eyes just as their daughters do, and they have experience to boot.
Sophie's mother smiles at the success of our projects. She reads the hearts of the
two young people. She sees that it is time to captivate the heart of the new
Telemachus. She gets her daughter to speak. Her daughter responds with her natural
gentleness in a timid voice which makes its effect all the better. At the first
sound oi this voice Emile surrenders. It is Sophie. He no longer doubts it. If it
were not she, it would be too late for him to turn back.
It is then that the charms of this enchanting girl flow in torrents into his heart,
and he begins to swallow with deep draughts the poison with which she intoxicates
him. He no longer speaks, he no longer responds; he sees only Sophie, he hears only
Sophie. If she says a word, he opens his mouth; if she lowers her eyes, he lowers
his; if he sees her breathe, he sighs. It is Sophie's soul which appears to animate
him. How his own soul has changed in a few instants! It is no longer Sophie's turn
to tremble; it is Emile's. Farewell freedom, naivete, frankness! Confused,
embarrassed, fearful, he no longer dares to look around him for fear of seeing that
he is being looked at. Ashamed to let the others see through him, he would like to
make himself invisible to everyone in order to sate himself with contemplating her
without being observed. Sophie, on the contrary, is reassured by Emile's fear. She
sees her triumph. She enjoys it :
Nol mostra gia, ben che in suo cor ne rida.it}
Her countenance has not changed. But in spite of this modest air and these lowered
eyes, her tender heart palpitates with joy and tells her that Telemachus has been
found.
If I enter here into the perhaps too naive and too simple history of their innocent
love, people will regard these details as a frivolous game, but they will be wrong.
They do not sufficiently consider the influence which a man's first liaison with a
woman ought to have on the course of both their lives. They do not see that a first
impression as lively as that of love, or the inclination which takes its place, has
distant effects whose links are not perceived in the progress of the years but do
not cease to act until death. We are given treatises on education consisting of
useless, pedantic, bloated verbiage about the chimerical duties of children, and we
are not told a word about the most important and most difficult part of the whole
of education—the crisis
[415]
EMILE
that serves as a passage from childhood to man's estate. If I have been able to
make these essays useful in some respect, it is especially by having expanded at
great length on this essential part, omitted by all others, and by not letting
myself be rebuffed in this enterprise by false delicacies or frightened by
difficulties of language. If I have said what must be done, I have said what I
ought to have said. It makes very little difference to me if I have written a
romance.41 A fair romance it is indeed, the romance of human nature. If it is to be
found only in this writing, is that my fault? This ought to be the history of my
species.42 You who deprave it, it is you who make a romance of my book.
Another consideration which strengthens the first is that I am dealing here not
with a young man given over from childhood to fear, covetousness, envy, pride, and
all the passions that serve as instruments for common educations, but with a young
man for whom this is not only his first love but his first passion of any kind. On
this passion, perhaps the only one he will feel intensely in his whole life,
depends the final form his character is going to take. Once fixed by a durable
passion, his way of thinking, his sentiments, and his tastes are going to acquire a
consistency which will no longer permit them to deteriorate.
One can conceive that for Emile and me the night following such an evening is not
spent entirely in sleeping. What? Ought the mere agreement of a name to have so
much power over a wise man? Is there only one Sophie in the world? Do they all
resemble one another in soul as they do in name? Are all the Sophies he will see
his? Is he mad, getting passionate in this way about an unknown girl to whom he has
never spoken? Wait, young man. Examine. Observe. You do not even know yet whose
house you are in, and to hear you one would believe you are already in your own
home.
This is not the time for lessons, and such lessons are not going to be heard. They
only have the effect of giving the young man a new interest in Sophie out of the
desire to justify his inclination. This resemblance of names, this meeting (which
he believes is fortuitous), and my very reserve have only the effect of exciting
his vivacity. Already Sophie appears too estimable for him not to be sure of making
me love her.
I suspect that the next morning Emile will try to dress himself up more carefully
in his sorry traveling outfit. He does not fail to do so. But I laugh at his
eagerness to make use of the household linen. I see through his thought. I realize
with pleasure that, by seeing to it that there are things to be returned or
exchanged, he seeks to establish for himself a sort of connection which gives him
the right to send things back here and come back himself.
I had also expected to find Sophie a bit more dressed up. I was mistaken. This
vulgar coquetry is good for those whom one only wants to please. The coquetry of
true love is more refined; it has very different pretensions. Sophie is dressed up
even more simply and casually than the day before, although still with scrupulous
cleanliness. I see coquetry in this casualness only because I see affectation in
it. Sophie knows that more studied adornment is a declaration, but she does not
know that more casual adornment is also a declaration. She shows that she
[416]
BOOK V
is not content to please by her dress, that she also wants to please by her person.
What difference does it make to her lover how she is dressed provided that he sees
that she is concerned with him? Already sure of her empire, Sophie does not content
herself with appealing to Emile's eyes with her charms; his heart must seek them
out. It is no longer enough for her that he see her charms; she wants him to
suppose them. Has he not seen enough of them to be obliged to guess the rest?
It may be believed that, during the time of our discussions that night, Sophie and
her mother also did not remain silent. There were confessions extracted,
instructions given. The next day's gathering has been well prepared. It is not yet
twelve hours since our young people saw each other for the first time. They have
not yet said a single word to each other, and already one sees that they have
reached an understanding. Their manner is not familiar; it is embarrassed and
timid; they do not speak to each other. Their eyes are lowered and seem to avoid
each other; that is itself a sign of communication; they avoid each other, but by
agreement. They already sense the need of mystery before having said anything to
each other. As we leave, we ask permission to come back ourselves to return what we
are taking away with us. Emile's mouth asks this permission from the father and the
mother, while his apprehensive eyes, turned to the daughter, ask it from her much
more insistently. Sophie says nothing, makes no sign, appears to see nothing and
hear nothing. But she blushes, and this blush is a still clearer answer than her
parents'.
We are permitted to return without being invited to stay over. This conduct is
suitable. Board is given to passers-by who are at a loss for lodging, but it is not
seemly for a lover to sleep in his beloved's home.
We hardly are out of this dear house before Emile thinks of establishing ourselves
in the neighborhood. Even the nearest cottage seems too distant. He would like to
sleep in the ditches of the manor. "Giddy young man!" I say to him in a tone of
pity. "What, does passion already blind you? Do you already no longer see either
propriety or reason? Unfortunate one! You believe you are in love, and you want to
dishonor your beloved! What will be said when it is known that a young man who
leaves her home sleeps in the vicinity? You love her, you say! Will you then ruin
her reputation? Is that the payment for the hospitality her parents have granted
you? Will you cause the disgrace of the girl from whom you expect your happiness?"
"Well," he answers, "what difference do the vain talk of men and their unjust
suspicions make? Haven't you yourself taught me to take no notice of it? Who knows
better than I how much I honor Sophie, how much I want to respect her? My
attachment will not cause her shame; it will cause her glory; it will be worthy of
her. If my heart and my attentions everywhere render her the homage she deserves,
how can I insult her?" "Dear Emile," I respond, embracing him, "you reason for
yourself. Learn to reason for her. Do not compare the honor of one sex to that of
the other. They have entirely different principles. These principles are equally
solid and reasonable because they derive equally from nature; and the same virtue
which makes you despise men's talk for yourself
Ui7]
EMILE
obliges you to respect it for your beloved. Your honor is in you alone, and hers
depends on others. To neglect it would be to wound your own honor; and you do not
render yourself what you owe yourself if you are the cause of her not being
rendered what is owed her."
Then I explain the reasons for these differences to him, making him sense what an
injustice it would be to take no account of these differences. Who has told him
that he will be the husband of Sophie, whose sentiments he is ignorant of, whose
heart (or whose parents) has perhaps made prior commitments, whom he does not know,
and who perhaps suits him in none of the ways which can make for a happy marriage?
Does he not know that for a girl every scandal is an indelible stain, which even
her marriage to the man who caused it does not remove? What sensitive man wants to
ruin the girl he loves? What decent man wants to make an unfortunate girl weep
forever for the misfortune of having pleased him?
The young man, who is always extreme in his ideas, is frightened by the
consequences I make him envisage, and he now believes he is never far enough away
from Sophie's dwelling. He doubles his pace to flee more quickly. He looks around
to see whether we are overheard. He would sacrifice his happiness a thousand times
for the honor of the one he loves. He would rather not see her again in his life
than cause her any displeasure. This is the first fruit of the cares I took in his
youth to form in him a heart that knows how to love.
We have to find, then, an abode that is distant but within range. We seek, and we
make inquiries; we learn that two leagues away there is a town. We go to find
lodging there rather than in nearer villages, where our stay would become suspect.
The new lover finally arrives there full of love, hope, joy, and, especially, good
sentiments. And this is how, by directing his nascent passion little by little
toward what is good and decent, without his being aware of it I dispose all of his
inclinations to take the same bent.
I approach the end of my career. I already see it in the distance. All the great
difficulties are overcome. All the great obstacles are surmounted. Nothing
difficult is left for me to do, except not to spoil my work by hurrying to
consummate it. In the uncertainty of human life, let us avoid above all the false
prudence of sacrificing the present for the future; this is often to sacrifice what
is for what will not be. Let us make man happy at all ages lest, after many cares,
he die before having been happy. Now, if there is a time to enjoy life, it is
surely the end of adolescence when the faculties of body and soul have acquired
their greatest vigor. Man is then in the middle of his course, and he sees from the
greatest distance the two end points which make him feel its brevity. If imprudent
youth makes mistakes, it is not because it wants enjoyment; it is because it seeks
enjoyment where it is not, and because, while preparing a miserable future for
itself, it does not even know how to use the present moment.
Consider my Emile—now past twenty, well formed, well constituted in mind and body,
strong, healthy, fit, skillful, robust, full of sense, reason, goodness, and
humanity, a man with morals and taste, loving the beautiful, doing the good, free
from the empire of cruel passions,
[418]
BOOK V
exempt from the yoke of opinion, but subject to the law of wisdom and submissive to
the voice of friendship, possessing all the useful talents and some of the
agreeable ones, caring little for riches, with his means of support in his arms,
and not afraid of lacking bread whatever happens. Now he is intoxicated by a
nascent passion. His heart opens itself to the first fires of love. Its sweet
illusions make him a new universe of delight and enjoyment. He loves a lovable
object who is even more lovable for her character than for her person. He hopes
for, he expects a return that he feels is his due. It is from the similarity of
their hearts, from the conjunction of decent sentiments that their first
inclination was formed. This inclination ought to be durable. He yields
confidently, even reasonably, to the most charming delirium, without fear, without
regret, without remorse, without any other worry than that which is inseparable
from the sentiment of happiness. What is lacking to his happiness? Look, consider,
imagine what he still needs that can accord with what he has. He enjoys together
all the goods that can be obtained at once. None can be added except at the expense
of another. He is as happy as a man can be. Shall I at this moment shorten so sweet
a destiny? Shall I trouble so pure a delight? Ah, the whole value of life is in the
felicity he tastes! What could I give him which was worth what I had taken away
from him? Even in putting the crown on his happiness, I would destroy its greatest
charm. This supreme happiness is a hundred times sweeter to hope for than to
obtain. One enjoys it better when one looks forward to it than when one tastes it.
O good Emile, love and be loved! Enjoy a long time before possessing. Enjoy love
and innocence at the same time. Make your paradise on earth while awaiting the
other one. I shall not shorten this happy time of your life. I shall spin out its
enchantment for you. I shall prolong it as much as possible. Alas, it has to end,
and end soon. But I shall at least make it last forever in your memory and make you
never repent having tasted it.
Emile does not forget that we have things to return. As soon as they are ready, we
take horses and set out at full speed; this one time, Emile would like to have
arrived as soon as we leave. When the heart is opened to the passions, it is opened
to life's boredom. If I have not wasted my time, his whole life will not pass in
this way.
Unhappily there is a severe break in the road and the countryside proves heavy
going. We get lost. He notices it first, and without impatience and without
complaint he gives all his attention to finding his way again. He wanders for a
long time before knowing where he is, always with the same coolness. This means
nothing to you but a great deal to me, since I know his hot nature. I see the fruit
of the care I have taken since his childhood to harden him against the blows of
necessity.
Finally we arrive. The reception given us is far more simple and more obliging than
the first time. We are already old acquaintances. Emile and Sophie greet each other
with a bit of embarrassment and still do not speak to each other. What would they
say to each other in our presence? The conversation they require has no need of
witnesses. We take a walk in the garden. It has as its parterre a very well-
arranged kitchen garden; as its park it has an orchard covered with large,
U19]
EMILE
beautiful fruit trees of every kind, interspersed with pretty streams and beds full
of flowers. "What a beautiful place," cries out Emile, full of his Homer and always
enthusiastic. "I believe I see the garden of Alcinous." The daughter would like to
know who Alcinous is, and the mother asks. "Alcinous," I tell them, "was a king of
Corcyra whose garden, described by Homer, is criticized by people of taste for
being too simple and without enough adornment. * This Alcinous had a lovable
daughter who dreamed, on the eve of a stranger's receiving hospitality from her
father, that she would soon have a husband." 44 Sophie is taken aback and blushes,
lowers her eyes, bites her tongue. One cannot imagine such embarrassment. Her
father, who takes pleasure in increasing it, joins in and says that the young
princess herself went to wash the linen in the river. "Do you believe," he
continues, "that she would have disdained to touch the dirty napkins, saying that
they smelled of burnt fat?" Sophie, against whom the blow is directed, forgets her
natural timidity and excuses herself with vivacity: her papa knows very well that
all the small linen would have no other laundress than her if she had been allowed
to do it,t and that she would have done more of it with pleasure if she had been so
directed. While speaking these words, she looks at me on the sly with an
apprehensiveness which I cannot help laughing at, reading in her ingenuous heart
the alarm which makes her speak. Her father is cruel enough to pick up this bit of
giddiness by asking her in a mocking tone what occasion she has for speaking on her
own behalf here, and what she has in common with Alcinous' daughter? Ashamed and
trembling, she no longer dares to breathe a word or look at anyone. Charming girl,
the time for feigning is past. You have now made your declaration in spite of
yourself.
Soon this little scene is forgotten, or appears to be. Very happily for Sophie,
Emile is the only one who has understood nothing of it. The walk continues, and our
young people, who at first were at our sides, have difficulty adjusting themselves
to the slowness of our pace. Imperceptibly they move ahead of us, approach each
other, and finally meet, and we see them rather far in front of us. Sophie seems
attentive and composed. Emile speaks and gesticulates with fire. Their discussion
does not appear to bore them. At the end of a solid hour we turn back;
* On leaving the palace one finds a vast garden of four acres, hedged in all
around, planted with great flowering trees, producing pears, pomegranates, and
others of the fairest species, fig trees with sweet fruit and verdant olive trees.
Never during the whole year are these beautiful trees without fruit; winter and
summer the west wind's gentle breeze both fecundates some and ripens others. One
sees the pear and the apple grow old and dry on their trees, the fig on the fig
tree and the clusters of grapes on the vine stock. The inexhaustible vine does not
stop bearing new grapes; some are cooked and preserved in the sun on a threshing
floor, while others are used to make wine, leaving on the plant those still
blossoming, fermenting, or beginning to turn dark. At one of its ends two well-
cultivated patches covered with flowers are each adorned by a fountain, of which
one waters the whole garden, and the other, after having passed through the house,
is piped to a tall building in the city to provide water for the citizens. Such is
the description of Alcinous' royal garden in the seventh book of the Odyssey,
where, to the shame of that old dreamer Homer and the princes of his time, one sees
neither trellises nor statues nor waterfalls nor bowling greens.43
t I admit that I am rather grateful to Sophie's mother for not having let her spoil
with soap hands as soft as hers, hands which Emile will so often kiss.
[420]
BOOK V
we call them, and they return, but now they are the slow ones, and we see that they
use the time profitably. Finally their conversation suddenly stops before we are
within range of hearing them, and they speed up in order to rejoin us. Emile
approaches us with an open and caressing air. His eyes sparkle with joy; however,
he turns them with a bit of apprehensiveness toward Sophie's mother to see the
reception she will give him. Sophie is far from having so relaxed a bearing; as she
approaches, she seems quite embarrassed to be seen in a tete-a-tete with a young
man—she who has so often been with other young men without being bothered by it and
without its ever having been treated as wrong. Hurrying to reach her mother, she is
a bit out of breath; she says a few words which do not mean a great deal, as if to
give the impression of having been there for a long time.
From the serenity visible on the faces of these lovable children one sees that this
conversation has relieved their young hearts of a great weight. They are no less
reserved with one another, but it is a less embarrassed reserve. It now comes only
from Emile's respect, Sophie's modesty, and the decency of both. Emile dares to
address a few words to her; sometimes she dares to respond, but never does she open
her mouth for that purpose without casting her eyes toward her mother's. She
changes most palpably in her behavior toward me. She gives evidence of a more eager
regard for me. She looks at me with interest; she speaks to me affectionately. She
is attentive to what might please me. I see that she honors me with her esteem, and
that she is not indifferent to obtaining mine. I understand that Emile has spoken
to her about me. One would say that they have already plotted to win me over.
Nothing of the kind has happened, however, and Sophie herself is not won so
quickly. He will perhaps need my favor with her more than hers with me. Charming
couple! ... In thinking that my young friend's sensitive heart has given me a great
part in his first discussion with his beloved, I enjoy the reward for my effort.
His friendship has repaid everything.
The visits are repeated. The conversations between our young people become more
frequent. Intoxicated by love, Emile believes he has already attained his
happiness. However, he does not get Sophie's formal consent. She listens to him and
says nothing to him. Emile knows the extent of her modesty. He is not very
surprised by so much restraint. He senses that he does not stand badly with her. He
knows that it is fathers who marry off children. He supposes that Sophie is waiting
for an order from her parents. He asks her permission to solicit it. She does not
oppose his doing so. He speaks to me about it; I speak for him in his own presence.
What a surprise for him to learn that it is up to Sophie alone, and that to make
him happy she has only to want to do so. He begins no longer to understand anything
about her conduct. His confidence diminishes. He is alarmed; he sees that he has
not gotten as far as he thought he had. And it is then that his tenderest love
employs its most touching language to sway her.
Emile is not the kind of man who can guess what is hindering him. If he is not
told, he will never find out, and Sophie is too proud to tell him. The difficulties
which are holding her back would only make an-
[421]
EMILE
other girl more eager. She has not forgotten her parents' lessons. She is poor, and
Emile is rich; she knows it. He has a great deal to do in order to gain her esteem!
What merit must he possess in order to wipe away this inequality? But how could he
dream of these obstacles? Does Emile know he is rich? Does he even deign to inquire
about it? Thank heaven he has no need to be rich. He knows how to be beneficent
without riches. The good he does is drawn from his heart and not from his purse. He
gives his time, his care, his affections, and his person to the unhappy; and in
estimating his benefactions, he hardly dares to count the money he scatters among
the indigent.
Not knowing what to blame for his disgrace, he attributes it to his own fault: for
who would dare to accuse the object of his adoration of caprice? The humiliation of
his amour-propre increases his regret that his love has been spurned. He no longer
approaches Sophie with that lovable confidence of a heart which feels it is worthy
of hers. He is fearful and trembling before her. He no longer hopes to touch her by
tenderness. He seeks to sway her by pity. Sometimes his patience wearies, and
vexation is ready to take its place. Sophie seems to foresee these storms, and
glances at him. This glance alone disarms and intimidates him. He is more
thoroughly subjected than before.
Troubled by this obstinate resistance and this invincible silence, he opens his
heart to his friend. He confides to him the pain of a heart broken by sadness. He
implores his assistance and his counsel. "What an impenetrable mystery! She is
interested in my fate; I cannot doubt it. Far from avoiding me, she enjoys being
with me. When I arrive, she gives signs of joy, and when I leave, of regret. She
receives my attentions kindly. My services appear to please her. She deigns to give
me advice, sometimes even orders. Nevertheless, she rejects my entreaties and my
prayers. When I dare to speak of union, she imperiously imposes silence on me; and
if I add another word, she leaves me on the spot. For what strange reason does she
want me to be hers without wanting to hear a word about her being mine? You whom
she honors, you whom she loves and whom she will not dare to silence, speak, make
her speak. Serve your friend. Crown your work. Do not make all your care fatal to
your pupil. Ah, what he has gotten from you will cause his misery if you do not
complete his happiness!"
I speak to Sophie, and with little effort I extract from her a secret I knew before
she told it to me. I have more difficulty in obtaining permission to inform Emile.
Finally, I do obtain it and make use of it. This explanation sends him into a state
of astonishment from which he cannot recover. He understands nothing of this
delicacy. He cannot imagine what effect a few ecus more or less have on character
and merit. When I make him understand what they do to prejudices, he starts
laughing, and, transported with joy, he wants to leave on the spot to go and tear
up everything, throw out everything, renounce everything in order to have the honor
of being as poor as Sophie and to return worthy of being her husband.
"What!" I say, stopping him and laughing in turn at his impetuosity. "Will this
young mind never become mature; and after having philoso-
[422]
BOOK V
phized your whole life, will you never learn to reason? How can you not see that,
in following your insane project, you are going to make your situation worse and
Sophie more intractable? It is a small advantage to have a bit more property than
she does, but it would be a very big advantage to have sacrificed it all for her;
and if her pride cannot resolve to accept the former obligation to you, how will it
resolve to accept the latter? If she cannot endure that a husband be able to
reproach her for having enriched her, will she endure that he be able to reproach
her with having impoverished himself for her? O unhappy fellow, tremble lest she
suspect you of having had this project! Instead, become economical and careful for
love of her, lest she accuse you of wanting to win her by trickery and of
voluntarily sacrificing to her what you lose by neglect.
"Do you believe that at bottom great property frightens her and that it is
precisely wealth that is the source of her opposition? No, dear Emile, it has a
more solid and weightier cause—namely, the effect that wealth has on the soul of
the possessor. She knows that fortune's goods are always preferred over everything
else by those who have them. The rich all count gold before merit. In regard to the
family resources constituted by the contribution of money and services, they always
find that the latter never compensate for the former; they think that someone is
still in their debt when he has spent his life serving them while eating their
bread. What is there for you to do, Emile, to reassure her about her fears? Make
yourself well known to her. That is not the business of a day. Show her treasures
in your noble soul that are sufficient to redeem those with which you have the
misfortune to be endowed. By dint of constancy and time surmount her resistance. By
dint of great and generous sentiments force her to forget your riches. Love her,
serve her, serve her respectable parents. Prove to her that these efforts are the
effect not of a mad and fleeting passion but of ineffaceable principles engraved in
the depths of your heart. Give proper honor to merit that has been insulted by
fortune. This is the only means of reconciling her to merit favored by fortune."
One may conceive what transports of joy this speech gives to the young man, how
much confidence and hope it gives him. His decent heart is delighted that in order
to please Sophie he has to do exactly what he would do on his own if Sophie did not
exist or if he were not in love with her. However little one has understood his
character, who will not be able to imagine his conduct on this occasion?
Now I am the confidant of my two good young people and the mediator of their loves!
A fine employment for a governor! So fine that never in my life have I done
anything which raised me so much in my own eyes and made me so satisfied with
myself. Moreover, this employment does not fail to have its agreeable aspects. I am
not unwelcome in the house. I am entrusted with the care of keeping the lovers in
order. Emile, who is constantly trembling for fear of displeasing me, was never so
docile. The little girl overwhelms me with friendliness by which I am not deceived,
and I take for myself only what is intended for me. It is thus that she compensates
herself indirectly for the re-
[423]
EMILE
spect she imposes on Emile. Through me she gives him countless tender caresses
which she would rather die than give to him directly. And Emile, who knows that I
do not want to harm his interests, is charmed that I am on good terms with her.
When she refuses his arm in walking, he consoles himself with the fact that it is
to prefer mine to his. He leaves without complaint, grasping my hand, and saying
softly to me with his eyes as well as his voice, "Friend, speak for me." His eyes
follow us with interest. He tries to read our sentiments in our faces and to
interpret our speeches by our gestures. He knows that nothing of what is said
between us is inconsequential for him. Good Sophie, how your sincere heart is at
ease when, without being heard by Telemachus, you can converse with his Mentor!
With what lovable frankness you let him read everything going on in your tender
heart! With what pleasure you show him all your esteem for his pupil! With what
touching ingenuousness you let him discern even sweeter sentiments! With what
feigned anger you send the importunate Emile away when impatience forces him to
interrupt you! With what charming vexation you reproach him for his tactlesness
when he comes and prevents you from speaking well of him, from hearing good things
about him, and from always drawing some new reason for loving him from my
responses!
Having thus gotten himself tolerated as a suitor, Emile takes advantage of all the
rights of that position. He speaks, he urges, he entreats, he importunes. If he is
spoken to harshly or if he is mistreated, it makes little difference to him
provided that he make himself heard. Finally, though not without effort, he induces
Sophie to be kind enough to assume openly a beloved's authority over him—to
prescribe to him what he must do, to order instead of to ask, to accept instead of
to thank, to regulate the number and the time of his visits, to forbid him to come
until this day or to stay past that hour. All this is not done as a game but very
seriously. Although it was an effort to get her to accept these rights, she makes
use of them with a rigor that often reduces poor Emile to regret that he has given
them to her. But whatever she commands, he does not reply, and often, when leaving
to obey her, he looks at me with eyes full of joy telling me: "You see that she has
taken possession of me." Meanwhile, the proud girl observes him stealthily and
smiles secretly at her slave's pride.
Albani45 and Raphael, loan me the brush with which to paint sensuous delight.
Divine Milton, teach my coarse pen to describe the pleasures of love and innocence.
But, no, hide your lying arts before the holy truth of nature. You need only have
sensitive hearts and decent souls; then let your imagination wander without
constraint in contemplating the transports of two young lovers who—under the eyes
of their parents and their guides—are untroubled as they yield themselves to the
sweet illusion delighting them; in the intoxication of their desires they advance
slowly toward their goal, weaving flowers and garlands around the happy bond which
is going to unite them until the grave. So many charming images intoxicate me that
I bring them together without order and without coherence; the delirium they cause
prevents me from connecting them. Oh, who has a heart and does not know how to
depict for
[424]
BOOK V
himself the delicious scenes of the father, the mother, the daughter, the governor,
and the pupil in their various situations and their respective contributions to the
union of the most charming couple that can be made happy by love and virtue?
Having become truly eager to please, Emile now begins to sense the value of the
agreeable talents with which he has provided himself. Sophie loves to sing. He
sings with her. He does more; he teaches her music. She is lively and light, and
she likes to jump. He dances with her; he turns her jumps into steps; he trains
her. These lessons are charming. Rollicking gaiety animates them, and it mitigates
the timid respect of love. A lover is permitted to give these lessons voluptuously.
He is permitted to be his mistress's master.
They have an old harpsichord that is in very bad shape. Emile fixes it and tunes
it. He is a maker of keyboard and stringed instruments as well as a carpenter. His
maxim was always to learn to do without the help of others in regard to everything
he could do himself. The house is in a picturesque setting. He draws different
views of it—to which Sophie sometimes puts her hand—and she ornaments her father's
study with them. Their frames are not gilded and do not need to be. By watching
Emile sketch and imitating him, she becomes more skillful from following his
example. She cultivates all the talents, and her charm embellishes them all. Her
father and mother recall their former opulence in seeing the fine arts, which alone
made opulence dear to them, flourishing around them again. Love has adorned their
entire home. Without expense and without effort, love alone establishes there the
reign of the same pleasures which they previously assembled only by dint of money
and boredom.
As the idolator enriches the object of his worship with treasures that he esteems
and adorns on the altar the God he adores, so the lover— although he may very well
see his mistress as perfect—constantly wants to add new ornaments to her. She does
not need them in order to please him, but he needs to adorn her. It is a new homage
he believes he is doing her and a new interest he adds to the pleasure of
contemplating her. It seems to him that nothing beautiful is in its place when it
is not ornamenting the supreme beauty. It is both a touching and a laughable
spectacle to see Emile eager to teach Sophie all he knows, without considering
whether what he wants to teach her is to her taste or is suitable for her. He tells
her about everything, he explains everything to her with a puerile eagerness. He
believes he has only to speak and she will understand on the spot. He fancies
beforehand the pleasure he will have in reasoning and in philosophizing with her.
He regards as useless all the attainments he cannot display to her eyes. He almost
blushes at knowing something she does not know.
Therefore, he gives her lessons in philosophy, physics, mathematics, history—in a
word, in everything. Sophie lends herself with pleasure to his zeal and tries to
profit from it. When he can obtain permission to give his lessons on his knees
before her, how content Emile is! He believes he sees the heavens opened. However
this position, more constricting for the student than for the master, is not the
most favor -
[425]
EMILE
able for instruction. On such occasions she does not know exactly what to do with
her eyes to avoid those that are pursuing them; and when they meet, the lesson does
not gain by it.
The art of thinking is not foreign to women, but they ought only to skim the
sciences of reasoning. Sophie gets a conception of everything and does not remember
very much. Her greatest progress is in ethics and in matters of taste. As for
physics, she remembers only some idea of its general laws and of the cosmic system.
Sometimes on their walks, as they contemplate nature's marvels, their innocent and
pure hearts dare to lift themselves up to its Author. They do not fear His
presence. They open their hearts jointly before Him.
"What, two lovers in the flower of age use their tete-a-tete to speak of religion?
They spend their time saying their catechism?" Why must you debase something
sublime? Yes, no doubt they do say it, under the influence of the illusion which
charms them. They see each other as perfect; they love one another; they converse
with each other enthusiastically about what gives virtue its reward. The sacrifices
they make to virtue render it dear to them. In the midst of transports that they
must vanquish, they sometimes shed tears together purer than heaven's dew, and
these sweet tears constitute the enchantment of their life. They are in the most
charming delirium that human souls have ever experienced. Their very privations add
to their happiness and do them honor in their own eyes for their sacrifices.
Sensual men, bodies without souls, one day they will know your pleasures, and for
their whole lives they will regret the happy time during which they denied them to
themselves.
Despite their being on such good terms, they do not fail to have some
disagreements, even some quarrels. The mistress is not without caprice nor the
lover without anger. But these little storms pass rapidly and only have the effect
of strengthening their union. Experience even teaches Emile not to fear them so
much; the reconciliations are always more advantageous to him than the spats are
harmful. The fruit of their first spat made him hope for as much from the others.
He was wrong. But, in the end, if he does not always take away so palpable a
profit, he always gains from these spats by seeing Sophie confirm her sincere
interest in his heart. People will want to know what this profit is. I will gladly
consent to tell them, for this example gives me the occasion to expound a most
useful maxim and to combat a most baneful one.
Emile loves. Therefore, he is not bold. And it can even more readily be conceived
that the imperious Sophie is not the girl to overlook his familiarities. Since
moderation has its limits in all things, she could be charged with too much
harshness rather than too much indulgence; and her father himself sometimes fears
that her extreme pride will degenerate into haughtiness. In their most secret tete-
a-tetes Emile would not dare to solicit the least favor nor even to appear to
aspire to one. When she is so kind as to take his arm during a walk—a favor she
does not allow to be turned into a right—he hardly dares occasionally to sigh and
press this arm against his breast. Nevertheless, after long constraint he furtively
ventures to kiss her dress, and several times he is lucky enough for Sophie to be
so kind as not to notice it. One day when he wants to take the same liberty a bit
more openly,
[426]
BOOK V
she decides to take it amiss. He persists. She gets irritated. Vexation dictates a
few stinging words. Emile does not endure them without reply. The rest of the day
is passed in pouting, and they separate very discontented.
Sophie is ill at ease. Her mother is her confidant. How could she hide her chagrin
from her? It is her first spat, and a spat that lasts an hour is so great a
business! She repents her mistake. Her mother permits her to make amends. Her
father orders her to do so.
The next day Emile is apprehensive and returns earlier than usual. Sophie is in her
mother's dressing room. Her father is also there. Emile enters respectfully but
with a sad air. Sophie's father and mother have hardly greeted him when Sophie
turns around and, extending her hand, asks him in a caressing tone how he is. It is
clear that this pretty hand has been extended only in order to be kissed. He takes
it and does not kiss it. Sophie is a bit ashamed, and she withdraws her hand with
as good grace as is possible for her. Emile, who is not experienced in women's ways
and does not know the purpose of their caprices, does not forget easily and is not
so quickly appeased. Sophie's father, seeing her embarrassment, succeeds in
disconcerting her by mockery. The poor girl is confused and humiliated; she no
longer knows what she is doing and would give anything in the world to dare to cry.
The more she constrains herself, the more her heart swells. A tear finally escapes
her in spite of her efforts. Emile sees this tear, rushes to her knees, takes her
hand, and kisses it several times, entranced. "Really, you are too good," says her
father, bursting out laughing. "I would have less indulgence for all these mad
girls, and I would punish the mouth that offended me." Emboldened by this speech,
Emile turns a suppliant eye toward Sophie's mother and, believing he sees a sign of
consent, tremblingly approaches Sophie's face. She turns her head away and, in
order to save her mouth, exposes a rosy cheek. The tactless boy is not satisfied.
She resists feebly. What a kiss, if it were not stolen under a mother's eyes!
Severe Sophie, take care. He will often ask you for permission to kiss your dress,
provided that you sometimes refuse it.
After this exemplary punishment Sophie's father leaves to attend to some business;
her mother sends Sophie away under some pretext, and then she addresses Emile and
says to him in quite a serious tone: "Monsieur, I believe that a young man as well
born and as well raised as you, who has sentiments and morals, would not want to
repay the friendship a family has showed him by dishonoring it. I am neither
unsociable nor a prude. I know what must be overlooked in the wild-ness of youth,
and what I have tolerated under my eyes sufficiently proves it to you. Consult your
friend about your duties. He will tell you what a difference there is between the
games authorized by the presence of a father and mother and the liberties taken far
away from them, liberties which abuse their confidence and turn into traps the same
favors which are innocent under their eyes. He will tell you, sir, that my daughter
has done you no other wrong than that of not noticing at the outset a practice she
ought never to have tolerated. He will tell you that everything taken to be a favor
becomes one, and that it is unworthy of a man of honor to abuse a young girl's
simplicity to usurp in secret the
[427]
EMILE
same liberties that she can permit before everyone. One knows what propriety can
permit in public; but no one knows where the man who sets himself up as the sole
judge of his whims will stop himself in the shadows of secrecy."
After this just reprimand, addressed much more to me than to my pupil, this wise
mother departs and leaves me admiring her rare prudence, which takes little account
of one's kissing her daughter's mouth in front of her but is frightened of
someone's daring to kiss her daughter's dress in private. Reflecting on the folly
of our maxims, which always sacrifice true decency to propriety, I understand why
language is more chaste as hearts become more corrupted and why rules of conduct
are more exact as those subject to them become more dishonest.
In using this occasion to fill Emile's heart with the duties I ought to have
dictated to him earlier, I am struck by a new reflection which perhaps honors
Sophie the most and which I am nevertheless very careful not to communicate to her
lover. It is clear that this pretended pride for which others reproach her is only
a very wise precaution to protect her from herself. Since she has the misfortune to
sense a combustible temperament within herself, she dreads the first spark and
keeps it at a distance with all her power. It is not from pride that she is severe;
it is from humility. She assumes an empire over Emile which she fears she does not
have over Sophie. She uses the one to fight the other. If she were more confident,
she would be much less proud. Apart from this one point, what girl in the world is
more yielding and sweeter? Who endures an offense more patiently? Who is more
fearful of committing one against others? Who makes fewer claims of every kind,
except for the claim of virtue? Furthermore, it is not her virtue of which she is
proud; she is proud only in order to preserve it. And when she can yield to the
inclination of her heart without risk, she caresses even her lover. But her
discreet mother does not relate all these details even to her father. Men ought not
to know everything.
Far from seeming to have become proud as a result of her conquest, Sophie has
become still more affable and less demanding with everyone—except perhaps with him
who is the cause of this change. The sentiment of independence no longer swells her
noble heart. She triumphs with modesty, winning a victory which costs her her
freedom. Her bearing is less free and her speech is more timid now that she no
longer hears the word lover without blushing. But contentment pierces through her
embarrassment, and this very shame is not a disagreeable sentiment. It is
especially with other young men that the difference in her conduct is most easily
sensed. Since she no longer fears them, the extreme reserve that she used to have
with them has been much relaxed. Now that she has made her choice, she has no
qualms about acting graciously toward those to whom she is indifferent. Since she
no longer takes any interest in them, she is less demanding about their merits, and
she finds them always likable enough for people who will never mean anything to
her.
If true love could make use of coquetry, I would even believe that I see some
traces of it in the way Sophie behaves with these young men
[428]
BOOK V
in the presence of her lover. One would say that, not content with the ardent
passion which she kindles in him by means of an exquisite mixture of reserve and
endearment, she is not sorry if she excites this passion still more by means of a
bit of anxiety. One would say that by purposely making her young guests merry, she
intends to torment Emile with the charms of a playfulness she does not dare to
indulge in with him. But Sophie is too attentive, too good, and too judicious
actually to torment him. Love and decency take the place of prudence for her in
tempering this dangerous stimulant. She knows how to alarm him and to reassure him
precisely when it is necessary. And if she sometimes makes him anxious, she never
makes him sad. Let us pardon the concern she causes the man she loves by
attributing it to her fear that he is never bound to her closely enough.
But what effect will this little trick have on Emile? Will he or won't he be
jealous? This is what must be examined, for such digressions also enter into the
aim of my book and stray very little from my subject.46
I have previously showed how this passion is introduced into man's heart in regard
to things which depend only on opinion. But in regard to love the case is
different. Jealousy then appears to depend so closely on nature that it is hard to
believe that it does not come from it. And the example of the animals, several of
whom are jealous to the point of fury, seems unanswerably to establish that it does
come from nature. Is it men's opinion which teaches cocks to tear one another apart
and bulls to fight to the death?
The aversion against everything which disturbs and combats our pleasures is a
natural emotion; that is incontestable. Up to a certain point the case is still the
same with the desire for exclusive possession of what pleases us. But when this
desire becomes a passion and transforms itself into a fury or a suspicious and
gloomy whim called jealousy, then the case is different. This passion may or may
not be natural. A distinction must be made.
The example drawn from the animals has been heretofore examined in the Discourse on
Inequality, and now that I reflect on it anew, this examination appears to me solid
enough to dare to refer readers to it.47 I shall add to the distinctions I have
made in that writing only that the jealousy coming from nature depends very much on
sexual potency. When this potency is or appears to be unlimited, this jealousy is
at its peak; for then the male measures his rights according to his needs and can
never see another male as anything but an intrusive competitor. In these same
species the females, who always obey the first male that arrives, belong to the
males only by right of conquest and cause eternal fights among them.
By contrast, in species in which one male is united with one female, in which
mating produces a sort of moral bond—a sort of marriage—the female belongs by her
own choice to the male to whom she has given herself, and commonly resists all
others. And the male, who has this affection founded on preference as a guarantee
of her fidelity, is thus less anxious at the sight of other males and lives more
peacefully with them. In these species the male shares the care of the
[429]
EMILE
little ones, and by one of those laws of nature that one does not observe without
being touched, it seems that the female repays the father for the attachment he has
for his children.
Now, if we consider the human species in its primitive simplicity, it is easy to
see from the male's limited potency and the moderation of his desires that he is
destined by nature to be content with one female. This is confirmed by the
numerical equality of the individuals of the two sexes, at least in our climates—an
equality which by no means exists in species in which the greater strength of males
causes several females to be united with a single male. And although it is the case
that a man does not sit on the eggs like a pigeon, nor does he have breasts for
giving milk and therefore in that respect belongs to the class of the quadrupeds,
nevertheless the children crawl and are weak for so long that they and the mother
would have difficulty doing without the attachment of the father and the care which
results from it.
All these observations concur to prove that the jealous fury of the males in some
species of animals is not at all conclusive for man, and the very exception of the
southern climates where polygamy is established only confirms the principle. For
the husbands' tyrannical precautions come from the plurality of women, and the
sentiment of his own weakness leads the man to have recourse to coercion in order
to elude the laws of nature.
Among us, where these same laws are less eluded in this way, but are eluded in an
opposite and more odious manner, jealousy has its motive in the social passions
more than in primitive instinct. In most liaisons of gallantry the lover hates his
rivals far more than he loves his mistress. If he fears that he is not the only
object of her attentions, it is the effect of that amour-propre whose origin I have
showed, and he suffers far more out of vanity than out of love. Moreover, our
maladroit institutions have made women so dissembling * and have so strongly
inflamed their appetites that one can hardly count on their most proved attachment
and that they can no longer demonstrate preferences which reassure a man against
the fear of competitors.
As regards true love, the case is different. I have showed in the writing already
cited that this sentiment is not as natural as is thought. There is a great
difference between the sweet habit which makes a man affectionate toward his
companion and that unbridled ardor which intoxicates him with the chimerical
attractions of an object which he no longer sees as it really is. This passion
longs only for exclusions and preferences, and it differs from vanity only in that
the latter, which demands everything and grants nothing, is always iniquitous,
whereas love, which gives as much as it demands, is in itself a sentiment filled
with equity. Moreover, the more love is demanding, the more it is credulous. The
same illusion which causes it makes it easy to persuade. If love is anxious, esteem
is confident; and love without esteem
* The species of dissimulation I mean here is the opposite of that which suits them
and which they get from nature. The one consists in disguising the sentiments they
have, and the other in feigning those they do not have. All society women spend
their lives priding themselves on their pretended sensitivity and never love
anything but themselves.
[430]
BOOK V
never existed in a decent heart because it is only the qualities he values that
anyone loves in his beloved.
With all of this well clarified, one can specify with certainty the sort of
jealousy Emile will be capable of; since this passion hardly has any seeds in the
human heart, its form is determined exclusively by education. When he is in love
and jealous, Emile will be not quick to anger, suspicious, and distrustful but
delicate, sensitive, and timid. He will be more alarmed than irritated; he will pay
far more attention to winning his mistress than to threatening his rival. If he
can, he will get rid of him as an obstacle, without hating him as an enemy. If he
hates his rival, it will not be for the audacity of contending with him for a heart
to which he has laid a claim, but for making him run the real danger of losing her.
His unjust pride will not be stupidly offended by someone's daring to enter into
competition with him. Understanding that the right of preference is founded solely
on merit and that honor is to be found in sucess, he will redouble his efforts to
make himself lovable, and he will probably succeed. The generous Sophie, in
exciting his love by giving him some moments of alarm, will know how to regulate
them well and to compensate him for them; and it will not be long before the
competitors, who were tolerated only to put Emile to the test, will be dismissed.
But where do I sense myself imperceptibly being led? O Emile, what have you become?
Can I recognize my pupil in you? How far you seem to have fallen! Where is the
young man brought up with such hardness, the young man who braved the rigors of the
seasons, who gave his body to the harshest labors and his soul only to the laws of
wisdom, who was inaccessible to prejudices and to the passions, who loved only
truth, who yielded only to reason and depended on nothing except himself? Now,
softened by an idle life, he lets himself be governed by women. Their amusements
are his occupations, their wills are his laws; a young girl is the arbiter of his
destiny, and he crawls and bends before her. The grave Emile is a child's
plaything!
This is how the scenes of life change. Each age has its own springs that make it
move, but man is always the same. At ten he is led by cakes, at twenty by a
mistress, at thirty by the pleasures, at forty by ambition, at fifty by avarice.
When does he run after wisdom? Happy is the man who is led to it in spite of
himself! What difference does it make what guide is used, provided that it leads to
the goal? Heroes and wise men themselves have paid this tribute to human weakness;
and the man who put his clumsy fingers to the spindle was no less a great man
because of that.48
Do you want to extend the effect of a successful education throughout a whole life?
Prolong the good habits of childhood during youth; and when your pupil is what he
ought to be, fix it so that he will be the same at all times. This is the final
perfection that you still must give to your work. It is for this above all that it
is important to leave a governor with young men, for it is hardly to be feared that
they will not know how to make love without him. What misleads teachers and
especially fathers is their belief that one way of life excludes another
[43i]
EMILE
and that, as soon as someone is grown up, he ought to renounce everything he did
when he was young. If that were so, what would be the use of devoting so much care
to childhood, since the good or the bad use made of childhood would disappear along
with it and, when someone adopted an absolutely different way of life, he would
necessarily adopt other fashions of thinking?
Just as it is only great illnesses that interrupt the continuity of memory, it is
generally only great passions that interrupt the continuity of morals. Although our
tastes and our inclinations change, this change, which is sometimes rather brusque,
is moderated by our habits. In the sequence of our inclinations, as in a good
gradation of colors, the skillful artist ought to make the transitions
imperceptible, confounding and mixing the tints and, in order that none clashes,
extending several throughout his whole work. This rule is confirmed by experience.
Immoderate people change their affections, tastes, and sentiments every day, and
they are constant only in the habit of change. But the steady man always returns to
his old practices and even in his old age does not lose his taste for the pleasures
he loved as a child.
If you see to it that in passing into a new age young people do not develop a
contempt for the preceding one; that in contracting new habits they do not abandon
their old ones; and that they always love to do what is good without regard to the
time when they began doing it—only then will you have preserved your work, and you
will be sure of these young people unto the end of their days. For the revolution
most to be feared belongs to the age over which you are now keeping watch. Since
one always yearns to return to this age, later it is difficult to destroy any
childhood tastes that were preserved during it; whereas when such tastes are
interrupted at this age, they are never resumed in one's whole life.
Most of the habits you believe you give to children and young people are not true
habits. Because children only adopt such habits by force and stick to them
grudgingly, they are only waiting for the occasion to be rid of them. One does not
get the taste for being in prison by dint of staying there. Far from diminishing
the aversion, the habit then increases it. It is not thus with Emile, who in his
childhood did everything voluntarily and with pleasure. In continuing to act the
same way as a man, he therefore only adds the empire of habit to the sweetness of
freedom. The active life, work with his hands, exercise, and movement have become
so necessary to him that he could not give them up without suffering. To reduce him
all of a sudden to a soft and sedentary life would be to imprison him, to enchain
him, to keep him in a violent and constrained state. I do not doubt that his
disposition and his health would be equally corrupted. He can hardly breathe at his
ease in a well-closed room. He needs fresh air, movement, toil. Even when he is at
Sophie's knee, he cannot prevent himself from sometimes looking at the countryside
out of the corner of his eye and desiring to roam it with her. Nevertheless, he
stays when he has to stay, but he is restless and agitated; he seems to struggle
with himself; he stays because he is in irons. You are going to say that these are
needs to which I have
[432]
BOOK V
submitted him, subjections that I have given him, and all that is true. I have
subjected him to man's estate.
Emile loves Sophie. But what are the chief charms which have attached him to her?
Sensitivity, virtue, love of decent things. While loving this love in his mistress,
will he have lost it in himself? For what price did Sophie in turn give herself?
She was won by all the sentiments natural to her lover's heart: esteem of true
goods, frugality, simplicity, generous disinterestedness, contempt for show and
riches. Emile had these virtues before love imposed them on him. How, then, has
Emile truly changed? He has new reasons to be himself. This is the single point
where he differs from what he was.
I do not imagine that anyone reading this book with some attention could believe
that all the circumstances of the situation in which Emile finds himself have been
gathered around him by chance. Is it by chance that, although the cities furnish so
many lovable girls, the one who pleases him is to be found only in the depths of a
distant retreat? Is it by chance that he meets her? Is it by chance that they suit
one another? Is it by chance that they cannot lodge in the same place? Is it by
chance that he finds a dwelling so far from her? Is it by chance that he sees her
so rarely and that he is forced to purchase the pleasure of seeing her once in a
while with so much exertion? He is becoming effeminated, you say? On the contrary,
he is hardening himself. He has to be as robust as I have made him to withstand the
exertion Sophie makes him endure.
He lodges two leagues away from her. This distance is the bellows of the forge. By
means of it I temper the arrows of love. If they lived next door to each other, or
if he could go to see her seated in softness in a good carriage, he would love her
at his ease as a Parisian loves. Would Leander have wanted to die for Hero if the
sea had not separated him from her? 4I) Reader, spare me words. If you are made for
understanding me, you will be quite able to follow my rules in my detailed
examples.
The first times that we went to see Sophie, we had traveled on horseback in order
to go more quickly. We find this expedient convenient, and the fifth time we are
still traveling on horseback. We are expected. At more than half a league from the
house we perceive people on the path. Emile observes them, his heart throbs, he
approaches; he recognizes Sophie, leaps from his horse, dashes off, and is quickly
at the feet of the lovable family. Emile loves fine horses. His own horse is
lively; when it becomes aware that it is free, it takes off through the fields. I
follow it, catch it with some effort, and bring it back. Unhappily Sophie is afraid
of horses; I do not dare to approach her. Emile sees nothing. But Sophie informs
him in a whisper of the effort he has let his friend make. Quite ashamed, Emile
runs up to take the horses and stays back. It is just for each to have his turn. He
leaves first in order to get rid of our mounts. On leaving Sophie behind him in
this way, he no longer finds the horse so convenient a vehicle. He returns out of
breath and meets us halfway.
On our next trip Emile no longer wants to use horses. "Why?" I say
[433]
EMILE
to him. "We have only to take a lackey to care for them." "Ah," he says, "are we to
burden Sophie's respectable family in this way? You see that they want to feed
everyone, both men and horses." "It is true," I respond, "that they have the noble
hospitality of indigence. The rich, who are miserly amidst their ostentation, lodge
only their friends, but the poor also lodge their friends' horses." "Let us go on
foot," he says. "Don't you have the courage, you who so goodheartedly share your
child's fatiguing pleasures?""Very gladly," I respond at once."Moreover, it seems
to me that love prefers to go about its business without so much stir."
On approaching, we find mother and daughter still farther out on the path than the
first time. We have traveled like a thunderbolt. Emile is all in a sweat. A dear
hand deigns to wipe his cheeks with a handkerchief. There would have to be a lot of
horses in the world before we would be tempted to make use of them again.
However, it is quite cruel for Emile and Sophie never to be able to spend the
evening together. Summer advances. The days begin to get shorter. No matter what we
say, we are never permitted to wait until nightfall before going home; and if we do
not come early in the morning, we have to leave practically as soon as we have
arrived. As a result of pitying us and being anxious about us, Sophie's mother
concludes that although in truth they could not properly lodge us in their house, a
bed in which to sleep could sometimes be found for us in the village. At these
words Emile claps his hands and shivers with joy. And Sophie, without being aware
of it, kisses her mother a little more often on the day she comes up with this
expedient.
Little by little the sweetness of friendship and the familiarity of innocence are
established and strengthened between us. On the days prescribed by Sophie or by her
mother I usually come with my friend; sometimes I let him go alone. Confidence
elevates the soul, and one ought no longer to treat a man as a child. And what
progress would I have made if my pupil did not merit my esteem? I, too,
occasionally go without him. Then he is sad but does not grumble. What would be the
use of grumbling? Besides, he knows that I am not going to hurt his interests.
Finally, whether we go together or separately, no weather stops us, and we are
quite proud to arrive in a pitiable state. Unfortunately Sophie prohibits us this
honor and forbids us to come in bad weather. It is the only time I find her
rebellious against the rules which I dictate to her in secret.
One day when Emile has gone alone, and I am not expecting him until the next day, I
see him arrive that same evening. Embracing him, I say, "What, dear Emile, you
return to your friend!" But, instead of responding to my caresses, he says to me,
with a bit of bile, "Don't believe that I come back so soon of my own will. I come
in spite of myself. She wanted me to come. I come for her and not for you." Touched
by this naivete, I embrace him once again and say to him, "Frank soul, sincere
friend, do not deprive me of what is mine. If you come for her, it is for me that
you say so. Your return is her work, but your frankness is mine. Always retain that
noble candor of beauti-
[434]
BOOK V
ful souls. People who do not matter can be allowed to think what they want, but it
is a crime to let a friend give us credit for something we did not do for him."
I carefully avoid debasing the value of his admission in his eyes. This would be
the result if I were to find more love and generosity in it and say to him that he
wants less to deprive himself of the credit of this return than to give it to
Sophie. But this is how he discloses the depths of his heart to me without being
aware of it: if he comes at a leisurely pace, dreaming of his love, Emile is only
Sophie's lover. But if he arrives with great strides and is heated up, although in
a bit of a grumbling mood, Emile is his Mentor's friend.
From the arrangements I have made, one sees that my young man is far from spending
his life near Sophie and seeing her as much as he would want. A trip or two a week
are all that he receives permission to make, and his visits, which are often
limited to a single half day, are rarely extended to the next day. He employs far
more time in hoping to see Sophie or in congratulating himself on having seen her
than in actually seeing her. And of the time devoted to his trips he spends less of
it with her than in getting there or going back. His pleasures, which are true,
pure, and delicious but less real than imaginary, exacerbate his love without
effeminating his heart.
On the days when he does not see her, he is not idle and sedentary. On those days
he is Emile again. He has not been transformed at all. Most often he roams through
the surrounding countryside. He pursues his natural history; he observes and
examines the earth, its products, and its cultivation; he compares the way of
farming he sees to the ones he knows; he seeks the reasons for the differences.
When he judges other methods preferable to the local ones, he gives them to the
farmers. If he proposes a better form of plow, he has it made according to his
designs. If he finds a marl quarry, he teaches them its use which is unknown in
these parts. Often he puts his hand to the work himself. The farmers are all
surprised to see him handle their tools more easily than they do themselves, dig
furrows deeper and straighter than theirs, sow more evenly, and lay out embankments
with more intelligence. They do not make fun of him as a fine talker about
agriculture. They see that he actually knows about it. In a word, he extends his
zeal and his care to everything which is of primary and general utility. He does
not even limit himself to that. He visits the peasants' houses, inquires about
their condition, their families, the number of their children, the quantity of
their lands, the nature of their produce, their market, their means, their
expenses, their debts, etc. He does not give them much money, knowing that they
usually employ it badly; but he directs its employment himself and makes it useful
to them in spite of themselves. He provides them with workers and often pays them
wages themselves to do the work they need. He gets one farmer to rebuild or roof
his cottage which is half in ruins; he gets another to clear his land which has
been abandoned for want of means; he provides a third with a cow, a horse, and
livestock of all kinds to replace those he has lost. Two neighbors are ready to
enter into litiga-
[435]
EMILE
tion; he wins them over and reconciles them. A peasant falls ill; he has him cared
for; he cares for him himself.* Another is harassed by a powerful neighbor; he
protects and advises him. Two poor young people want to be united; he helps them to
get married. A good woman has lost her dear child; he goes to see her and consoles
her; he does not leave as soon as he has gone in. He does not disdain the indigent,
and he is not in a hurry to get away from the unhappy. He often takes his meal with
the peasants he assists. He also accepts a meal from those who do not need him. In
becoming the benefactor of some and the friend of the others, he does not cease to
be their equal. Finally, he always does as much good with his person as with his
money.
Sometimes he takes his walks in the direction of the happy dwelling. He could hope
to see Sophie on the sly, to see her taking her walk without himself being seen.
But Emile's conduct is never devious; he does not know how to be evasive and does
not want to be. He has that amiable delicacy which flatters and feeds amour-propre
with the good witness of oneself. He rigorously sticks to his banishment and never
approaches near enough to get from chance what he wants to owe only to Sophie. On
the other hand, he wanders with pleasure in her neighborhood, seeking for traces of
his beloved's steps, touched by the efforts she has taken and the errands she has
been kind enough to run for the sake of obliging him. On the eve of the days when
he is going to see her, he will go to some neighboring farm to order a snack for
the next day. Their walk is directed toward this place without appearing to be.
They enter as though by chance; they find fruits, cakes, and custard. The dainty
Sophie is not insensitive to these attentions and gladly gives us credit for our
foresight; for I always get a share of the compliment, although I had no share in
the effort that elicits it. This is the evasion used by a little girl to feel less
embarrassed in giving thanks. Her father and I eat cakes and drink wine. But Emile
is part of the women's crowd, and he is always on the lookout to steal some dish of
custard into which Sophie has dipped her spoon.
Apropos of cakes, I speak to Emile of his former races. The others want to know
what these races were. I explain, and they laugh. They ask him whether he still
knows how to run. "Better than ever," he answers. "I would be very upset if I were
to forget." One of the company would like very much to see him run but does not
dare to say so. Someone else takes responsibility for making the request. He
accepts. Two or three young people from the neighborhood are gathered together. A
prize is established and, in order better to imitate Emile's former games, a cake
is placed on the goal. All are ready. Sophie's papa gives the signal by striking
his hands. The agile Emile cleaves the air and arrives at the end of the course
almost before my three bumpkins have started. Emile receives the prize from
Sophie's hands, and, no less generous than Aeneas, he gives presents to all the
vanquished.50
* To care for a sick peasant, do not purge him, give him drugs, or send him a
surgeon. These poor people need none of those things in their illnesses. They need
better and more plentiful food. You others should fast when you have a fever. But
when your peasants have one, give them meat and wine. Almost all their illnesses
come from poverty and exhaustion. Their best herb tea is in your cellar; their only
apothecary ought to be your butcher.
[436]
BOOK V
Amidst the brilliance of Emile's triumph Sophie dares to defy the conqueror and
boasts that she runs as well as he. He does not refuse to enter the lists with her.
While she prepares her entry on the course —trussing up her dress on both sides
and, more concerned to display a slender leg to Emile's eyes than to vanquish him
in this combat, seeing whether her skirt is short enough—he says a word in her
mother's ear. The mother smiles and gives a sign of approval. Emile then comes and
places himself beside his competitor, and no sooner is the signal given than she is
seen to take off and fly like a bird.
Women are not made to run. When they flee, it is in order to be caught. Racing is
not the only thing they do maladroitly, but it is the only thing they do
gracelessly; their elbows, drawn back and glued to their bodies, give them a
ridiculous aspect, and the high heels on which they are perched make them appear
like grasshoppers who want to run without jumping.
Imagining that Sophie runs no better than any other woman, Emile does not deign to
leave his place and watches her depart with a mocking smile. But Sophie is light
and wears low heels. She needs no artifice to appear to have a small foot. She
takes the lead with such rapidity that Emile has just enough time to catch this new
Atalantani when he perceives her so far ahead of him. He therefore departs in turn,
like an eagle swooping down on its prey. He pursues her, follows close on her
heels, and finally catches up with Sophie who is all out of breath. Gently putting
his left arm around her, he lifts her like a feather and, pressing this sweet
burden to his heart, completes the course. He makes her touch the goal first and
then, shouting, "Sophie is the winner," puts his knee on the ground before her and
admits that he is conquered.
To these various occupations is added the trade we have learned. At least one day a
week and on all those days when bad weather does not permit us to stay out in the
countryside, Emile and I go to work at a master's. We work there not for form's
sake, as men above this station, but as true workers. Once when Sophie's father
comes to see us, he finds us at work and does not fail to report with admiration to
his wife and his daughters what he has seen. "Go and see this young man in the
workshop," he says, "and you will see whether he despises the condition of the
poor!" One can imagine whether Sophie is glad to hear this speech! They talk about
it again; they would like to surprise him at work. They question me without giving
any indication of what they are about, and after making sure about one of our
workdays, mother and daughter take a caleche and come to the city on that day.
On entering the shop, Sophie perceives at the far end a young man in a jacket who
has his hair carelessly bound up and is so busy with what he is doing that he does
not see her. She stops and gives her mother a sign. Emile, with a chisel in one
hand and the mallet in the other, is completing a mortise. Then he saws a plank and
fixes one piece in the vise to polish it. This sight does not make Sophie laugh. It
touches her; it is respectable. Woman, honor the head of your house. It is he who
works for you, who wins your bread, who feeds you. This is man.
While they are attentively observing Emile, I notice them and tug on Emile's
sleeve. He turns around, sees them, drops his tools, and darts
[437]
EMILE
toward them with a shout of joy. After having yielded to his initial transports, he
makes them sit down and picks up his work again. But Sophie cannot stay seated. She
gets up with vivacity, roams the shop, examines the tools, touches the polished
surfaces of the planks, gathers havings from the floor, looks at our hands, and
then says that she likes this trade because it is clean. The silly girl even tries
to imitate Emile. With her frail white hand she pushes a plane along the plank. The
plane slides and does not bite. I believe I see Love in the air laughing and
beating his wings. I believe I hear him let out shouts of gladness and say,
"Hercules is avenged." °2
Meanwhile her mother questions the master. "Sir, how much do you pay these
fellows?" "Madame, I give them each twenty sous a day, and I feed them. But if this
young man wished, he could earn a lot more, for he is the best worker hereabouts."
"Twenty sous a day, and you feed them!" says Sophie's mother looking at us with
emotion. "Madame, that's the way it is," responds the master. At these words she
runs to Emile, embraces him, presses him to her bosom while shedding tears on him,
unable to say anything other than to repeat several times, "My son! O my son!"
After having spent some time chatting with us but without distracting us, the
mother says to her daughter, "Let us go; it is late, and we must not keep people
waiting." Then, approaching Emile, she gives him a little pat on the cheek and says
to him, "Well, good worker, don't you want to come with us?" He answers in a very
sad tone, "I am committed. Ask the master." The master is asked if he would be kind
enough to do without us. He answers that he cannot. "I have pressing work which
must be delivered the day after tomorrow," he says. "Counting on these gentlemen, I
have turned away other workers who showed up. If these two fail me, I do not know
where to find others, and I will not be able to deliver the work on the promised
day." The mother makes no reply. She expects Emile to speak. Emile lowers his head
and keeps quiet. "Sir," she says, a bit surprised by this silence, "have you
nothing to say to this?" Emile looks tenderly at her daughter and answers with only
these words, "You see that I have to stay." At that the ladies depart and leave us.
Emile accompanies them to the door, follows them with his eyes as far as he can,
sighs, returns without speaking, and sets to work.
Sophie's mother is piqued, and on the way she speaks to her daughter about the
strangeness of this behavior. "What?" she says. "Was it so difficult to satisfy the
master without being obliged to stay? Doesn't this young man, who is so prodigal
and who pours out money without necessity, any longer know how to find money on
suitable occasions?" "O mother," Sophie answers, "God forbid that Emile put so much
emphasis on money that he use it to break a personal commitment, to violate his
word with impunity, and to cause someone else's word to be violated! I know that he
could easily compensate the worker for the slight harm his absence would cause him.
But meanwhile he would enslave his soul to riches; he would accustom himself to
putting his riches in the place of his duties and to believing that one is excused
from everything provided one pays. Emile has other ways of thinking,
[438]
BOOK V
and I hope not to be the cause of his changing them. Do you believe it cost him
nothing to stay? Mama, don't deceive yourself. It is for me that he stays. I saw it
in his eyes."
It is not that Sophie is easygoing in regard to the true attentions of love. On the
contrary, she is imperious and exacting. She would rather not be loved than be
loved moderately. She has that noble pride based on merit which is conscious of
itself, esteems itself, and wants to be honored as it honors itself. She would
disdain a heart which did not feel the full value of her heart, which did not love
her for her virtues as much as, and more than, for her charms, and which did not
prefer its own duty to her and her to everything else. She did not want a lover who
knew no law other than hers. She wants to reign over a man whom she has not
disfigured. It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses' companions, disdains
them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change."'3
But apart from this inviolable and sacred right, Sophie is excessively jealous of
all her rights and watches to see how scrupulously Emile respects them, how
zealously he accomplishes her will, how skillfully he guesses it, and how vigilant
he is to arrive at the prescribed moment. She wants him to be neither late nor
early. She wants him to be on time. To be early is to prefer himself to her; to be
late is to neglect her. Neglect Sophie! That would not happen twice. The unjust
suspicion that it happened once came close to ruining everything. But Sophie is
equitable, and she knows how to make amends for her wrongs.
One evening we are awaited. Emile has received the order. They come out to meet us.
We do not arrive. "What became of them? What misfortune has befallen them? Why
haven't they sent anyone?" The evening is spent waiting for us. Poor Sophie
believes us dead. She is desolate; she torments herself; she spends the night
crying. In the evening they had sent a messenger to inquire after us and report
news of us the next morning. The messenger returns accompanied by another messenger
from us who makes our excuses orally and says that we are well. A moment later we
ourselves appear. Then the scene changes. Sophie dries her tears; or if she sheds
any, they are tears of rage. Her haughty heart has not profited from being
reassured about our lives. Emile lives and has kept her waiting needlessly.
At our arrival she wants to closet herself. She is asked to stay. She has to stay.
But, making her decision on the spot, she affects a tranquil and contented air
intended to make an impression on others. Her father comes out to meet us and says,
"You have kept your friends in a state of distress. There are people here who will
not easily pardon you." "Who is that, papa?" says Sophie, affecting the most
gracious smile she can. "What difference does it make to you," her father answers,
"provided it is not you?" Sophie does not reply and lowers her eyes to her work.
Her mother receives us with a cold and composed air. Emile is embarrassed and does
not dare approach Sophie. She speaks to him first, asks him how he is, invites him
to sit down, and counterfeits so well that the poor young man, who still
understands nothing of the language of the violent passions, is taken in by this
coolness and as a result is about to get piqued himself.
[439]
EMILE
To disabuse him, I go and take Sophie's hand. I want to bring it to my lips as I
sometimes do. She withdraws it briskly, saying the word "Monsieur!" in such a
singular manner that this involuntary movement at once opens Emile's eyes.
Seeing that she has betrayed herself, Sophie is less constrained. Her apparent
coolness changes into an ironical contempt. She responds to everything said to her
in monosyllables pronounced in a slow and unsure voice, as though she is afraid to
let the accent of indignation pierce through too much. Emile, who is half-dead with
fright, looks at her sorrowfully and tries to get her to cast her eyes on his so
that he can better read her true sentiments. Sophie is further irritated by his
confidence and casts a glance at him which takes away his desire to solicit a
second one. Taken aback and trembling, Emile no longer dares—very fortunately for
him—to speak to her or look at her; for even were he not guilty, she would never
have pardoned him if he had been able to bear her anger.
Seeing that it is my turn and that it is time to explain ourselves, I return to
Sophie. I take her hand which she no longer withdraws, for she is about to faint. I
tell her gently, "Dear Sophie, we are luckless fellows, but you are reasonable and
just, and you will not judge us without hearing us. Listen to us." She does not
answer, and I speak as follows:
"We left yesterday at four o'clock. We were told to arrive at seven o'clock, and we
always set aside more time than we need so that we can rest before approaching
here. We had already come three-quarters of the way when we heard pained laments.
They came from a gorge between the hills at some distance from us. We ran toward
the cries. We found an unfortunate peasant who had been a bit drunk as he rode back
from the city and had fallen off his horse so heavily that he broke his leg. We
shouted for help. No one answered. We tried to put the injured man back on his
horse, but did not succeed; at the slightest movement the luckless fellow suffered
horrible pain. We decided to tie up his horse out of the way in the woods. Then,
making a stretcher of our arms, we set the injured man on it and carried him as
gently as possible, following his directions about the route to be taken in order
to get to his home. The way was long. We had to rest several times. We finally
arrived, completely worn out. We found with bitter surprise that we already knew
the house, and that this poor fellow whom we were carrying back with such effort
was the same man who had received us so cordially the day of our first arrival
here. In our mutual distress we had not recognized each other until that moment.
"He had only two little children. His wife, who was about to give him a third, was
so overwhelmed at the sight of him that she felt sharp pains and gave birth a few
hours later. What was to be done in this situation in an isolated cottage where one
could not hope for any help? Emile decided to go and get the horse that we had left
in the woods, to mount it and to ride at full gallop to look for a surgeon in the
city. He gave the horse to the surgeon. As he was not able to find a nurse quickly
enough, he returned on foot with a domestic after having sent you a messenger.
Meanwhile in the house I was at a loss, as you can believe, between a man with a
broken leg and a woman in labor;
[440]
BOOK V
but I readied everything which I could foresee might be necessary to help them
both.
"I shall not give you the rest of the details. That is not now the question. It was
two hours past midnight before either of us had a moment's respite. Finally, we
returned before dawn to our rooms near here, where we awaited the hour of your
rising in order to give you an account of our accident."
I stop speaking without adding anything. But before anyone speaks, Emile approaches
his beloved, raises his voice, and says to her with more firmness than I would have
expected, "Sophie, you are the arbiter of my fate. You know it well. You can make
me die of pain. But do not hope to make me forget the rights of humanity. They are
more sacred to me than yours. I will never give them up for you."
At these words Sophie, instead of responding, rises, puts an arm around his neck,
and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Then, extending her hand with inimitable grace,
she says to him, "Emile, take this hand. It is yours. Be my husband and master when
you wish. I will try to merit this honor."
Hardly has she embraced him, before her delighted father claps his hands, shouting,
"Encore, encore!" Without having to be urged, Sophie immediately gives him two
kisses on the other cheek. But almost at the same instant, frightened by all she
has done, she escapes into her mother's arms and hides her face, afire with shame,
in that maternal bosom.
I will not describe the common joy. Everyone ought to sense it. After dinner Sophie
asks whether those poor sick people are too far away for us to go to see them.
Sophie desires it, and it is a good deed. We go. We find them in two separate beds.
Emile had had a second bed brought in. We find them surrounded by people who are
there to help them. Emile had provided for that. But both husband and wife are
lying in such disorder that they suffer as much from discomfort as from their
conditions. Sophie gets one of the good woman's aprons and goes to settle the wife
in her bed. Next she does the same for the man. Her gentle and light hand knows how
to get at everything that hurts them and to place their sore limbs in a more
relaxed position. They feel relieved at her very approach. One would say that she
guesses everything which hurts them. This extremely delicate girl is rebuffed
neither by the dirtiness nor the bad smell and knows how to make both disappear
without ordering anyone about and without the sick being tormented. She who always
seems so modest and sometimes so disdainful, she who would not for anything in the
world have touched a man's bed with the tip of her finger, turns the injured man
over and changes him without any scruple, and puts him in a position in which he
can stay more comfortably for a long time. The zeal of charity outweighs modesty.
What she does, she does so lightly and with so much skill that he feels relieved
almost without having noticed that he has been touched. Wife and husband together
bless the lovable girl who serves them, who pities them, who consoles them. It is
an angel from heaven that God sends them. She has the appearance and the grace, as
well as the gentleness and the goodness of an angel. Emile is moved and con-
[44i]
EMILE
templates her in silence. Man, love your companion. God gives her to you to console
you in your pains, to relieve you in your ills. This is woman.
The newborn child is baptized. The two lovers present it, yearning in the depths of
their hearts to give others an occasion to perform the same task. They long for the
desired moment. They believe they have reached it. All of Sophie's scruples have
been removed, but mine are aroused. They are not yet where they think they are.
Each must have his turn.
One morning, when they have not seen each other for two days, I enter Emile's room
with a letter in my hand; staring fixedly at him, I say, "What would you do if you
were informed that Sophie is dead?" He lets out a great cry, gets up, striking his
hands together, and looks wild-eyed at me without saying a single word. "Respond
then," I continue with the same tranquility. Then, irritated by my coolness, Emile
approaches, his eyes inflamed with anger, and stops in an almost threatening
posture: "What would I do ... I don't know. But what I do know is that I would
never again in my life see the man who had informed me." "Reassure yourself," I
respond, smiling. "She is alive. She is well. She thinks of you, and we are
expected this evening. But let us go and take a stroll, and we will chat."
The passion with which he is preoccupied no longer permits him to give himself to
purely reasoned conversations as he had before. I have to interest him by this very
passion to make him attentive to my lessons. This is what I have done by this
terrible preamble. I am now quite sure that he will listen to me.
"You must be happy, dear Emile. That is the goal of every being which senses. That
is the first desire which nature has impressed on us, and the only one which never
leaves us. But where is happiness? Who knows it? All seek it, and none finds it.
One man uses up life in pursuing it, and another dies without having attained it.
My young friend, when I took you in my arms at your birth and, calling the Supreme
Being to be witness of the commitment I dared to contract, dedicated my days to the
happiness of yours, did I myself know what I was committing myself to? No, I only
knew that in making you happy, I was sure to be. In making this useful quest for
you, I was making it for both of us in common.
"So long as we do not know what we ought to do, wisdom consists in remaining
inactive. Of all the maxims, this is the one of which man has the greatest need,
and the one which he least knows how to follow. To seek happiness without knowing
where it is, is to expose oneself to the danger of fleeing it and to run as many
risks of finding the opposite of happiness as there are roads on which to go
astray. But it is not everyone who knows how to refrain from acting. In the anxiety
in which the ardor for well-being keeps us, we would rather make a mistake in
pursuing it than do nothing to seek it; and once we have left the place where we
can know it, we no longer know how to get back to it.
"Although afflicted with the same ignorance, I have tried to avoid the same
mistake. In taking care of you, I resolved not to take a useless
[442]
BOOK V
step and to prevent you from taking one. I kept to the road of nature while waiting
for it to show me the road of happiness. It turned out that they were the same and
that, by not thinking about it, I had followed the road of happiness.
"Be my witness and my judge. I shall never impugn you. Your first years were not
sacrificed to those which were to follow. You have enjoyed all the goods nature
gave you. Of the ills to which it subjects you and from which I could protect you,
you have felt only those which could harden you against other ills. You have never
suffered any of them except to avoid greater ones. You have known neither hatred
nor slavery. Free and contented, you have stayed just and good; for pain and vice
are inseparable, and man never becomes wicked except when he is unhappy. May the
memory of your childhood be prolonged until your old age. I am not afraid that your
good heart will ever recall your childhood without giving some thanks to the hand
which governed it.
"When you entered the age of reason, I protected you from men's opinions. When your
heart became sensitive, I preserved you from the empire of the passions. If I had
been able to prolong this inner calm to the end of your life, I would have secured
my work, and you would always be as happy as man can be. But, dear Emile, it is in
vain that I have dipped your soul in the Styx; I was not able to make it everywhere
invulnerable. A new enemy is arising which you have not learned to conquer and from
which I can no longer save you. This enemy is yourself. Nature and fortune had left
you free. You could endure poverty; you could tolerate the pains of the body; those
of the soul were unknown to you. You were bound to nothing other than the human
condition, and now your are bound to all the attachments you have given to
yourself. In learning to desire, you have made yourself the slave of your desires.
Without anything changing in you, without anything offending you, without anything
touching your being, how many pains can now attack your soul! How many ills you can
feel without being sick! How many deaths you can suffer without dying! A lie, a
mistake, or a doubt can put you in despair.
"In the theater, you saw heroes, overcome by extreme pains, make the stage
reverberate with their senseless cries, grieving like women, crying like children,
and thus meriting public applause. Do you remember how scandalized you were by
these lamentations, cries, and complaints on the part of men from whom one ought to
expect only acts of constancy and firmness? 'What?' you said very indignantly. 'Are
these the examples we are given to follow, the models we are offered for imitation!
Are they afraid that man is not small enough, unhappy enough, and weak enough
without someone extolling his weakness under the false image of virtue?' My young
friend, be more indulgent with the stage henceforward. Now you have become one of
its heroes.54
"You know how to suffer and die. You know how to endure the law of necessity in
physical ills, but you have not yet imposed laws on the appetites of your heart,
and the disorder of our lives arises from our affections far more than from our
needs. Our desires are extended; our strength is almost nil. By his wishes man
depends on countless things, and by himself he depends on nothing, not even his own
life. The
[443]
EMILE
more he increases his attachments, the more he multiplies his pains. Everything on
earth is only transitory. All that we love will escape us sooner or later, and we
hold on to it as if it were going to last eternally. What a fright you had at the
mere suspicion of Sophie's death! Did you, then, count on her living forever? Does
no one die at her age? She is going to die, my child, and perhaps before you. Who
knows if she is living at this very instant? Nature had enslaved you only to a
single death. You are enslaving yourself to a second. Now you are in the position
of dying twice.
"How pitiable you are going to be, thus subjected to your unruly passions! There
will always be privations, losses, and alarms. You will not even enjoy what is left
to you. The fear of losing everything will prevent you from possessing anything. As
a result of having wanted to follow only your passions, you will never be able to
satisfy them. You will always seek repose, but it will always flee before you. You
will be miserable, and you will become wicked. How could you not be, since you have
only your unbridled desires as a law? If you cannot tolerate involuntary
privations, how will you impose any on yourself voluntarily? How will you know how
to sacrifice inclination to duty and to hold out against your heart in order to
listen to your reason? You who already wish never again to see the man who will
inform you of your mistress's death, how would you see the man who would want to
take her from you while she is still living—the one who would dare to say to you,
'She is dead to you. Virtue separates you from her'? If you have to live with her
no matter what, it makes no difference whether Sophie is married or not, whether
you are free or not, whether she loves you or hates you, whether she is given you
or refused you; you want her, and you have to possess her whatever the price.
Inform me, then, at what crime a man stops when he has only the wishes of his heart
for laws and knows how to resist nothing that he desires?
"My child, there is no happiness without courage nor virtue without struggle. The
word virtue comes from strength. Strength is the foundation of all virtue. Virtue
belongs only to a being that is weak by nature and strong by will. It is in this
that the merit of the just man consists; and although we call God good, we do not
call Him virtuous, because it requires no effort for Him to do good. I have waited
for you to be in a position to understand me before explaining this much profaned
word to you. So long as virtue costs nothing to practice, there is little need to
know it. This need comes when the passions are awakened. It has already come for
you. Raising you in all the simplicity of nature, I have not preached painful
duties to you but instead have protected you from the vices that make these duties
painful. I have made lying more useless than odious to you; I have taught you not
so much to give unto each what belongs to him as to care only for what is yours. I
have made you good rather than virtuous. But he who is only good remains so only as
long as he takes pleasure in being so. Goodness is broken and perishes under the
impact of the human passions. The man who is only good is good only for himself.
"Who, then, is the virtuous man? It is he who knows how to conquer his affections;
for then he follows his reason and his conscience;
[444]
BOOK V
he does his duty; he keeps himself in order, and nothing can make him deviate from
it. Up to now you were only apparently free. You had only the precarious freedom of
a slave to whom nothing has been commanded. Now be really free. Learn to become
your own master. Command your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous.
"Here, then, is another apprenticeship, and this apprenticeship is more painful
than the first; for nature delivers us from the ills it imposes on us, or it
teaches us to bear them. But nature says nothing to us about those which come from
ourselves. It abandons us to ourselves. It lets us, as victims of our own passions,
succumb to our vain sorrows and then glorify ourselves for the tears at which we
should have blushed.
"You now have your first passion. It is perhaps the only one worthy of you. If you
know how to rule it like a man, it will be the last. You will subject all the
others, and you will obey only the passion for virtue.
"This passion is not criminal, as I well know. It is as pure as the souls which
feel it. Decency formed it, and innocence nourished it. Happy lovers! For you the
charms of virtue only add to those of love, and the gentle bond that awaits you is
as much the reward of your moderation as it is of your attachment. But, tell me,
sincere man, has this passion, which is so pure, any the less subjected you? Did
you any the less make yourself its slave; and if tomorrow Sophie ceased being
innocent, would you stifle it beginning tomorrow? Now is the moment to try your
strength. There is no longer time to do so when that strength has to be employed.
These dangerous trials ought to be made far from peril. A man does not exercise for
battle in the face of the enemy but prepares himself for it before the war. He
presents himself at the battle already fully prepared.
"It is an error to distinguish permitted passions from forbidden ones in order to
yield to the former and deny oneself the latter. All passions are good when one
remains their master; all are bad when one lets oneself be subjected to them. What
is forbidden to us by nature is to extend our attachments further than our
strength; what is forbidden to us by reason is to want what we cannot obtain; what
is forbidden to us by conscience is not temptations but rather letting ourselves be
conquered by temptations. It is not within our control to have or not to have
passions. But it is within our control to reign over them. All the sentiments we
dominate are legitimate; all those which dominate us are criminal. A man is not
guilty for loving another's wife if he keep this unhappy passion enslaved to the
law of duty. He is guilty for loving his own wife to the point of sacrificing
everything to that love.
"Do not expect lengthy precepts of morality from me. I have only one precept to
give you, and it comprehends all the others. Be a man. Restrain your heart within
the limits of your condition. Study and know these limits. However narrow they may
be, a man is not unhappy as long as he closes himself up within them. He is unhappy
only when he wants to go out beyond them. He is unhappy only when, in his senseless
desires, he puts in the rank of the possible what is not possible. He is unhappy
when he forgets his human estate in order
[445]
EMILE
to forge for himself imaginary estates from which he always falls back into his
own. The only goods that it is costly to be deprived of are those one believes one
has a right to. The evident impossibility of obtaining them detaches one from them.
Wishes without hope do not torment us. A beggar is not tormented by the desire to
be a king. A king wants to be God only when he believes he is no longer a man.
"The illusions of pride are the source of our greatest ills. But the contemplation
of human misery makes the wise man always moderate. He stays in his place: he does
not stir himself to leave it; he does not uselessly wear out his strength in order
to enjoy what he cannot keep; and since he employs all his strength to get secure
possession of what he has, he is actually more powerful and richer than we are to
the extent that he desires less than we do. As a mortal and perishable being,
should I go and form eternal ties on this earth where everything changes, where
everything passes away, and from which I shall disappear tomorrow? O Emile, o my
son, if I lost you, what would remain of me? And nevertheless I must learn to lose
you, for who knows when you will be taken from me?
"Do you want, then, to live happily and wisely? Attach your heart only to
imperishable beauty. Let your condition limit your desires; let your duties come
before your inclinations; extend the law of necessity to moral things. Learn to
lose what can be taken from you; learn to abandon everything when virtue decrees
it, to put yourself above events and to detach your heart lest it be lacerated by
them; to be courageous in adversity, so as never to be miserable; to be firm in
your duty, so as never to be criminal. Then you will be happy in spite of fortune
and wise in spite of the passions. Then you will find in the possession even of
fragile goods a voluptuousness that nothing will be able to disturb. You will
possess them without their possessing you; and you will feel that man, who can keep
nothing, enjoys only what he knows how to lose. You will not, it is true, have the
illusion of imaginary pleasures, but you will also not have the pains which are
their fruit. You will gain much in this exchange, for these pains are frequent and
real, and these pleasures are rare and vain. As the conqueror of so many deceptive
opinions, you will also be the conqueror of the opinion that places so great a
value on life. You will pass your life without disturbance and terminate it without
fright. You will detach yourself from it as from all things. How many others are
horror-stricken because they think that, in departing from life, they cease to be?
Since you are informed about life's nothingness, you will believe that it is then
that you begin to be. Death is the end of the wicked man's life and the beginning
of the just man's."
Emile hears me with an attention that is mixed with anxiety. He fears some sinister
conclusion to this preamble. He has a presentiment that, in showing him the
necessity for exercising strength of soul, I want to subject him to this hard
exercise. Like a wounded man who shudders on seeing the surgeon approach, he
believes that he already feels on his wound the painful but salutary hand which
prevents it from becoming infected.
Uncertain, troubled, and eager to know what I am getting at, Emile
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BOOK V
fearfully questions me instead of answering. "What must be done?" he asks me,
almost trembling and without daring to raise his eyes. "That which must be done!" I
answer in a firm tone: "You must leave Sophie." "What are you saying?" he shouts
with anger. "Leave Sophie! Leave her, deceive her, be a traitor, a cheat, a per
juror . . . !" "What!" I respond, interrupting him. "Is it from me that Emile is
afraid of learning to merit such names?" "No," he continues with the same
impetuosity. "Not from you nor from another. In spite of you, I shall know how to
preserve your work. I shall know how not to merit those names."
I had expected this initial fury. I let it pass without getting upset. A fine
preacher of moderation I would make if I did not possess what I am preaching to
him! Emile knows me too well to believe me capable of demanding from him anything
which is bad, and he knows that it would be bad to leave Sophie in the sense he is
giving to that word. Therefore, he waits for me finally to explain myself. Then I
return to my discourse.
"Do you believe, dear Emile, that a man, in whatever situation he finds himself,
can be happier than you have been for these past three months? If you believe it,
disabuse yourself. Before tasting the pleasures of life, you have exhausted its
happiness. There is nothing beyond what you have felt. The felicity of the senses
is fleeting. It always loses its flavor when it is the heart's habitual state. You
have enjoyed more from hope than you will ever enjoy in reality. Imagination adorns
what one desires but abandons it when it is in one's possession. Except for the
single Being existing by itself, there is nothing beautiful except that which is
not. If your present state could have lasted forever, you would have found supreme
happiness. But everything connected with man feels the effects of his
transitoriness. Everything is finite and everything is fleeting in human life; and
if the state which makes us happy lasted endlessly, the habit of enjoying it would
take away our taste for it. If nothing changes from without, the heart changes.
Happiness leaves us, or we leave it.
"Time, which you did not measure, was flowing during your delirium. The summer is
ending; winter approaches. Even if we could continue our visits during so hard a
season, they would never tolerate it. In spite of ourselves, we must change our way
of life; this one can no longer last. I see in your impatient eyes that this
difficulty does not bother you. Sophie's confession and your own desires suggest to
you an easy means for avoiding the snow and no longer having to make a trip in
order to go and see her. The expedient is doubtless convenient. But when spring has
come, the snow melts, and the marriage remains. You must think about a marriage for
all seasons.
"You want to marry Sophie, and yet you have known her for less than five months!
You want to marry her not because she suits you but because she pleases you—as
though love were never mistaken about what is suitable, and as though those who
begin by loving each other never end by hating each other. She is virtuous, I know.
But is that enough? Is being decent sufficient for people to be suitable for each
other? It is not her virtue I am putting in doubt; it is her char-
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EMILE
acter. Does a woman's character reveal itself in a day? Do you know in how many
situations you must have seen her in order to get a deep knowledge of her
disposition? Do four months of attachment give you assurance for a whole life?
Perhaps two months of absence will make her forget you. Perhaps someone else is
only waiting for your withdrawal in order to efface you from her heart. Perhaps on
your return you will find her as indiiterent as up to now you have found her
responsive. The sentiments do not depend on principles. She may remain very decent
and yet cease to love you. She will be constant and faithful. I tend to believe it.
But who is answerable to you for her, and who is answerable to her for you so long
as you have not put one another to the test? Will you wait to make this test until
it becomes useless for you? Will you wait to know each other until you can no
longer separate?
"Sophie is not yet eighteen; you are just twenty-two. This is the age of love, but
not that of marriage. What a father and mother of a family! To know how to raise
children, at least wait until you cease being children! Do you know how many young
persons there are who have had their constitutions weakened, their health ruined,
and their lives shortened by enduring the fatigues of pregnancy before the proper
age? Do you know how many children have remained sickly and weak for want of having
been nourished in a body that was sufficiently formed? When mother and child grow
at the same time and the substance necessary to the growth of each of them is
divided, neither has what nature destined for it. How is it possible that both
should not suffer from it? Either I have a very poor knowledge of Emile, or he
would rather have a robust wife and robust children than satisfy his impatience at
the expense of their life and their health.
"Let us speak about you. In aspiring to the status of husband and father, have you
meditated enough upon its duties? When you become the head of a family, you are
going to become a member of the state, and do you know what it is to be a member of
the state? Do you know what government, laws, and fatherland are? Do you know what
the price is of your being permitted to live and for whom you ought to die? You
believe you have learned everything, and you still know nothing. Before taking a
place in the civil order, learn to know it and to know what rank in it suits you.
"Emile, you must leave Sophie. I do not say abandon her. If you were capable of it,
she would be only too fortunate not to have married you. You must leave in order to
return worthy of her. Do not be so vain as to believe that you already merit her.
Oh, how much there remains for you to do! Come and fulfill this noble task. Come
and learn to bear her absence. Come and win the prize of fidelity, so that on your
return you can lay claim to some honor from her and ask for her hand not as an act
of grace but as a recompense."
Not yet practiced at struggling against himself and not yet accustomed to desire
one thing and to will another, the young man does not give in. He resists; he
argues. Why should he deny himself the happiness awaiting him? Would delaying to
accept the hand which is offered him not be to disdain it? What need is there to go
away from her in order to inform himself about what he ought to know? And even
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BOOK V
if that were necessary, why should he not leave her the assured pledge of his
return in the form of indissoluble bonds? Let him be her husband, and he will be
ready to follow me. Let them be united, and he will leave her without fear . . .
"To be united in order to be separated. Dear Emile, what a contradiction! It is a
fine thing for a lover to be able to live without his beloved, but a husband ought
never to leave his wife except in case of necessity. To cure your scruples, I see
that your delay ought to be involuntary. You must be able to tell Sophie that you
are leaving her in spite of yourself. Very well, be content; and since you do not
obey reason, recognize another master. You have not forgotten the promise you made
to me. Emile, you have to leave Sophie. I wish it."
After this statement he lowers his head, keeps quiet, and dreams for a moment;
then, looking at me with assurance, he asks, "When do we leave?" "In a week," I
answer. "Sophie must be prepared for this departure. Women are weaker. One owes
them special consideration; and since this absence is not a duty for her as it is
for you, it is permissible for her to bear it less courageously."
I am only too tempted to prolong the journal of my two young people's love up to
their separation, but I have for a long time abused the indulgence of my readers.
Let us be brief in order to finish once and for all.
Will Emile dare to act at his beloved's feet with the same assurance he has just
shown to his friend? As for me, I believe he will. He ought to draw this assurance
from the very truth of his love. He would be more uncomfortable before her if it
cost him less to leave her. He would leave as the guilty party, and this role is
always embarrassing for a decent heart. But the more the sacrifice costs him, the
more he can lay a claim to honor in the eyes of her who makes it so difficult for
him. He is not afraid that she will be misled about the motive which determines
him. He seems to say to her with each glance, "O Sophie, read my heart and be
faithful! You do not have a lover without virtue."
The proud Sophie, for her part, tries to bear with dignity the unforeseen blow
which strikes her. She makes an effort to appear insensitive to it. But since she,
unlike Emile, does not have the honor of combat and victory, her firmness holds up
less well. She cries and groans in spite of herself, and the fear of being
forgotten embitters the pain of separation. She does not cry before her lover; it
is not to him that she shows her fears. She would choke rather than let a sigh
escape her in his presence. It is I who receive her complaints, who see her tears,
whom she affects to take as her confidant. Women are skillful and know how to
disguise themselves. The more she grumbles in secret against my tyranny, the more
attentive she is in flattering me. She senses that her fate is in my hands.
I console her. I reassure her. I make myself answerable for her lover, or rather
her husband. Let her be as faithful to him as he will be to her, and I swear that
in two years he will be her husband. She esteems me enough to believe that I do not
want to deceive her. I am the guarantor of each for the other. Their hearts, their
virtue, my probity, their parents' confidence—everything reassures them. But what
good does
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EMILE
reason do against weakness? They separate as if they were never to see each other
again.
It is then that Sophie recalls the regrets of Eucharis r'n and really believes she
is in her place. Let us not allow these fantastic loves to awaken during Emile's
absence. "Sophie," I say to her one day, "make an exchange of books with Emile.
Give him your Telemachus in order that he learn to resemble him, and let Emile give
you The Spectator,™ which you like to read. Study in it the duties of decent women,
and recall that in two years these duties will be yours." This exchange pleases
both and gives them confidence. Finally the sad day comes. They must separate.
Sophie's worthy father, with whom I have arranged everything, embraces me on
receiving my farewell. Then, taking me aside, he says the following words to me in
a grave tone and with a somewhat emphatic accent: "I have done everything to be
obliging to you. I knew that I was dealing with a man of honor. There remains only
one word to say to you. Remember that your pupil has signed his marriage contract
on my daughter's lips."
What a difference there is in the bearing of the two lovers! Emile is impetuous,
ardent, agitated, beside himself; he lets out cries, sheds torrents of tears on the
hands of the father, the mother, the daughter; he sobs as he embraces all the
domestics and repeats the same things a thousand times in a disorder that would
cause laugher on any other occasion. Sophie is gloomy and pale, with expressionless
eyes and a somber glance; she keeps quiet, says nothing, does not cry, and sees no
one, not even Emile. It is in vain that he takes her hands and holds her in his
arms; she remains immobile, insensitive to his tears, to his caresses, to
everything he does. For her, he is already gone. How much more touching her
behavior is than her lover's importunate complaints and noisy regrets! He sees it,
he feels it, he is grieved by it. I drag him away with difficulty. If I leave him
another moment, he will no longer be willing to part. I am charmed by the fact that
he takes this sad image with him. If he is ever tempted to forget what he owes to
Sophie, I shall recall her to him as he saw her at the moment of his departure. His
heart would have to have changed very much for me not to be able to return it to
her.
On Travel
It is asked whether it is good for young people to travel, and there is much
dispute about it. If the question were put differently and it were asked whether it
is good that men have traveled, perhaps there would not be so much dispute.
The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we
believe that we can dispense with learning it. Too much reading only serves to
produce presumptuous ignoramuses. Among all literary ages there has been none in
which men read so
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much as in this one, and none in which men are less knowledgeable. Among all the
countries of Europe there is none in which so many histories and accounts of
voyages are printed as in France, and none in which so little is known about the
genius and the morals of other nations. So great a number of books makes us neglect
the book of the world; or if we still read in it, each sticks to his own page. If
the phrase "Can one be Persian?" •"'" were unknown to me, I would guess on hearing
it that it comes from the country where national prejudices are most prevalent and
from the sex which most propagates them.
A Parisian believes he knows men, and he knows only the French. In his city, which
is always full of foreigners, he regards each foreigner as an extraordinary
phenomenon which has no equal in the rest of the universe. One has to have seen the
bourgeoisie of this great city close up and to have lived with them to believe that
people with so much cleverness can be so stupid. The bizarre thing is that each of
them has read perhaps ten times the description of a country and yet to him one of
its inhabitants will be an object of wonder.
It is too much to have to pierce through both the authors' prejudices and our own
in order to get to the truth. I have spent my life reading accounts of travels, and
I have never found two which have given me the same idea of the same people. In
comparing the little that I could observe myself with what I have read, I have
ended by dropping the travelers and regretting the time that I gave to informing
myself by reading them. I am quite convinced that in matters of observation of
every kind one must not read, one must see. This would be true even if all the
travelers were sincere, said only what they have seen or what they believe, and
disguised the truth only with the false colors it takes on in their own eyes. What
is the situation when one has, in addition, to discern the truth through their lies
and their bad faith!
Let us then leave the vaunted resource of books to those who are so constituted as
to be satisfied by books. Like Raymond Lulle's art, they are good for learning to
babble about what one does not know. They are good for training fifteen-year-old
Platos to philosophize in polite society and for informing a gathering about the
practices of Egypt and India on the testimony of Paul Lucas or Tavernier.r,K
I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does
not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived. Hence there is
another way of putting the same question about travel: does it suffice for a well-
educated man to know only his compatriots, or is it important for him to know men
in general? Here there no longer remains either dispute or doubt. Observe how much
the solution of a difficult question sometimes depends on the way of posing it!
But if one wants to study men, is it necessary to roam the entire earth? Is it
necessary to go to Japan to observe Europeans? Is it necessary to know all the
individuals to know the species? No. There are men who have such a strong
resemblance to one another that it is not worth the effort to study them
separately. Whoever has seen ten Frenchmen has seen them all. Although one cannot
say as much of the English and some other peoples, it is nonetheless certain that
each
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EMILE
nation has its own specific character which can be inferred from the observation
not of a single member but of several. Whoever has compared ten peoples knows men,
just as whoever has seen ten Frenchmen knows the French.
To become informed, it is not sufficient to roam through various countries. It is
necessary to know how to travel. To observe, it is necessary to have eyes and to
turn them toward the object one wants to know. There are many persons who are
informed still less by travel than by books, because they are ignorant of the art
of thinking; because when they read, their minds are at least guided by the author;
and because when they travel, they do not know how to see anything on their own.
Others do not become informed because they do not want to be informed. Their aim in
traveling is so different that this one hardly occurs to them. It is very much an
accident if one sees with exactitude what one does not care to look at. Of all the
peoples of the world, it is the French who travel most; but they are so full of the
practices of their own country that they confound everything which does not
resemble those practices. There are Frenchmen in every corner of the world. There
is no country in which one finds more persons who have traveled than in France. Yet
in spite of that, of all the peoples of Europe, the one which sees other countries
most knows them least. The Englishman travels too, but in another way. These two
peoples have to be opposites in everything. The English nobility travels, the
French nobility does not. The French people travel, the English people do not. This
difference appears to me to do honor to the latter. The French almost always have
some self-interest in view in their travels. But the English do not go fortune
hunting in other nations, unless it is by means of commerce, and they go with their
hands full. When they travel, it is to spend their money, not to work for a living.
They are too proud to go away from home and crawl. As a result, they inform
themselves better abroad than the French, who always have an entirely different aim
in mind. Nevertheless, the English also have their national prejudices. Indeed,
they have more of them than anyone, but these prejudices come less from ignorance
than from passion. The Englishman has the prejudices of pride, and the Frenchman
has those of vanity.
Just as the least cultured peoples are generally the wisest, so those who travel
least are the ones who travel best. Since they are less advanced than we are in our
frivolous researches and less occupied by the objects of our vain curiosity, they
give all their attention to what is truly useful. I know none but the Spanish who
travel in this way. While a Frenchman runs to the artists of a country, an
Englishman has a sketch made of some antique, and a German carries his notebook
around to all the learned men, the Spaniard quietly studies the country's
government, morals, and public order, and he is the only one of the four who brings
home with him some observation useful to his country.
The ancients traveled little, read little, and wrote few books, and yet one sees in
those of their books which remain to us that they observed one another better than
we observe our contemporaries. I will not go
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BOOK V
back to the writings of Homer, the only poet who transports us to the country he
describes. But one cannot deny Herodotus the honor of having depicted manners and
morals in his history—even though he does so more in his narratives than in his
reflections—and of having depicted them better than all our historians, who burden
their books with portraits and characteristics. Tacitus has described the Germans
of his times better than any writer has described the Germans of today. Those who
are conversant with ancient history incontestably know the Greeks, the
Carthaginians, the Romans, the Gauls, and the Persians better than any people of
our day knows its neighbors.
It must also be admitted that as the original character of a people fades from day
to day, it becomes proportionately more difficult to grasp. To the extent that
races are mixed and peoples confounded, one sees the gradual disappearance of those
national differences which previously struck the observer at first glance. Formerly
each nation remained more closed in upon itself. There was less communication, less
travel, fewer common or contrary interests, and fewer political and civil relations
among peoples; there were not so many of those royal annoyances called
negotiations, and no regular or resident ambassadors; great voyages were rare;
there was little far-flung commerce, and what little there was was done by the
prince himself who used foreigners for it, or by despised men who set the tone for
no one and did not bring the nations together. There is now a hundred times more
contact between Europe and Asia than there formerly was between Gaul and Spain.
Europe alone used to be more diverse than the whole world is today.
Moreover, the ancient peoples, who for the most part regarded themselves as
autochthonous or native to their own country, occupied their homeland long enough
to have lost the memory of the distant ages when their ancestors had established
themselves there and long enough to have given the climate time to make durable
impressions on them. Among us, by contrast, the recent emigrations of the
barbarians after the invasions of the Romans have mixed up and confounded
everything. Today's Frenchmen are no longer those great blond-haired and white-
skinned bodies of the past; the Greeks are no longer those beautiful men made to
serve as the models for art. The appearance of the Romans themselves has changed
character, just as their nature has. The Persians, who are natives of Tartary, lose
their former ugliness every day through the admixture of Circassian blood. The
Europeans are no longer Gauls, Germans, Iberians, and Allobroges. They are nothing
but Scythians who have degenerated in various ways in their looks and still more in
their morals.
This is why the ancient distinctions of races and the qualities of air and soil
distinguished the temperaments, looks, morals, and characters of different peoples
more strongly than all these things can be distinguished in our day. For today,
European inconstancy does not leave any natural cause enough time to make its
impressions; and with the forests leveled, the marshes dried up, and the land more
uniformly—although worse—cultivated, there is no longer even the same physical
difference from land to land and from country to country.
Perhaps on the basis of such reflections we would be in less of a hurry
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EMILE
to subject Herodotus, Ctesias, and Pliny to ridicule for having represented the
inhabitants of diverse countries with original features and distinct differences
which we no longer see in them. It would be necessary to rediscover the same men in
order to recognize the same looks. It would be necessary for nothing to have
changed them in order for them to have stayed the same. If we could at one time
consider all the men who have ever lived, can it be doubted that we would find that
they varied more from age to age than they do today from nation to nation?
At the same time that observations of other peoples become more difficult, they are
made more negligently and less well. This is another reason for the slight success
of our researches into the natural history of mankind. The instruction that one
extracts from travel is related to the aim that causes travel to be undertaken.
When this aim is a system of philosophy, the traveler never sees anything but what
he wants to see. When this aim is profit, it absorbs all the attention of those who
devote themselves to it. Commerce and the arts, which mingle and confound peoples,
also prevent them from studying one another. When they know the profit they can
make from one another, what more do they have to know?
It is useful for man to know all the places where he can live so that he then may
choose where he can live most comfortably. If each man were self-sufficient, the
only important thing for him to know would be the land capable of providing him
with subsistence. The savage, who needs no one and covets nothing in the world,
knows and seeks to know no lands other than his own. If he is forced to wander in
order to subsist, he flees the places inhabited by men. He has designs only on
beasts and has need only of them to feed himself. But for us to whom civil life is
necessary and who can no longer get along without devouring men, our interest is to
frequent the countries where the most men are found. This is why all flock to Rome,
Paris, and London. It is always in the capitals that human blood is sold most
cheaply. Thus one knows only the large nations, and the large nations all resemble
one another.
It is said that we have learned men who travel to inform themselves. This is an
error. The learned travel for profit like the others. The Platos and the
Pythagorases are no longer to be found; or if they do exist, it is quite far away
from us. Our learned men travel only by order of the court. They are dispatched,
subsidized, and paid to observe such and such an object, which is very surely not a
moral object. They owe all their time to this single object. They are too decent to
steal their money. If in some country there happen to be men who are curious and
travel at their own expense, it is never to study men but rather to instruct them.
It is not science they need but ostentation. How would they learn to shake off the
yoke of opinion in their travels? They only undertake them for the sake of opinion.
There is a big difference between traveling to see lands and traveling to see
peoples. The former is always the object of the curious; the latter is only
subsidiary for them. It ought to be exactly the opposite for someone who wants to
philosophize. The child observes things while
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BOOK V
waiting to be able to observe men. The man ought to begin by observing his kind and
then observe things if he has the time.
Therefore, it is bad reasoning to conclude from the fact that we travel badly that
travel is useless. But once the utility of travel is recognized, does it follow
that it is suitable for everyone? Far from it. On the contrary, it is suitable for
only very few people. It is suitable only for men sure enough about themselves to
hear the lessons of error without letting themselves be seduced and to see the
example of vice without letting themselves be carried away. Travel pushes a man
toward his natural bent and completes the job of making him good or bad. Whoever
returns from roaming the world is, upon his return, what he will be for his whole
life. More men come back wicked than good, because more leave inclined to evil than
to good. In their travels ill-raised and ill-guided young people contract all the
vices of the peoples they frequent and none of the virtues with which these vices
are mixed. But all those who are happily born, whose good nature has been well
cultivated, and who travel with the true intention of informing themselves, return
better and wiser than they left. It is in this way that my Emile will travel. Thus
traveled that young man, worthy of a better age, whose merit an astonished Europe
admired; although he deserved to live, he died for his country in the flower of his
years, and his grave, adorned by his virtues alone, was not honored until a foreign
hand covered it with flowers.59
Everything that is done by reason ought to have its rules. Travel— taken as a part
of education—ought to have its rules. To travel for the sake of traveling is to
wander, to be a vagabond. To travel to inform oneself is still to have too vague an
aim. Instruction which has no determined goal is nothing. I would want to give the
young man a palpable interest in informing himself, and if this interest were well
chosen, it would then determine the nature of the instruction. This is only a
continuation of the method I have tried to put into practice all along.
Now that Emile has considered himself in his physical relations with other beings
and in his moral relations with other men, it remains for him to consider himself
in his civil relations with his fellow citizens. To do that, he must begin by
studying the nature of government in general, the diverse forms of government, and
finally the particular government under which he was born, so that he may find out
whether it suits him to live there. For by a right nothing can abrogate, when each
man attains his majority and becomes his own master, he also becomes master of
renouncing the contract that connects him with the community by leaving the country
in which that community is established. It is only by staying there after attaining
the age of reason that he is considered to have tacitly confirmed the commitment
his ancestors made. He acquires the right of renouncing his fatherland just as he
acquires the right of renouncing his father's estate. Furthermore, since place of
birth is a gift of nature, one yields one's own place of birth in making this
renunciation. According to rigorous standards of right, each man remains free at
his own risk in
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EMILE
whatever place he is born unless he voluntarily subjects himself to the laws in
order to acquire the right to be protected by them.
Therefore, I might say to him: "Up to now you have lived under my direction. You
were not in a condition to govern yourself. But now you are approaching the age
when the laws put your property at your disposition and thus make you the master of
your own person. You are going to find yourself alone in society, dependent on
everything, even on your patrimony. You plan to settle down. This plan is laudable;
it is one of man's duties. But, before marrying, you must know what kind of man you
want to be, what you want to spend your life doing, and what measures you want to
take to assure yourself and your family of bread. Although one ought not to make
such a care his principal business, one must nonetheless think about it once. Do
you want to commit yourself to dependence on men whom you despise? Do you want to
establish your fortune and determine your status by means of civil relations which
will put you constantly at the discretion of others and force you to become a
rascal yourself in order to escape from the clutches of other rascals?"
Then I shall describe to him all the possible means of taking advantage of his
property, whether in commerce or public office or finance, and I shall show him
that every one of them will leave him risks to run, put him in a precarious and
dependent "state, and force him to adjust his morals, his sentiments, and his
conduct to the example and the prejudices of others.
"There is," I shall say to him, "another means of employing one's time and person.
That is to join the service—that is to say, to hire yourself out very cheaply to go
and kill people who have done us no harm. This trade is in high esteem among men,
and they make an extraordinary fuss about those who are good only for this.
Furthermore, this trade, far from allowing you to dispense with other resources,
only makes them more necessary to you. For one aspect of the honor of the military
estate is the impoverishment of those who devote themselves to it. It is true that
they are not all impoverished by it. It is even gradually becoming fashionable to
enrich oneself in this trade as in the others. But when I explain to you how those
who succeed in doing so go about it, I doubt that I will make you eager to imitate
them.
"You will also find out that even in this trade the main point is no longer courage
or valor, except perhaps with women. On the contrary, the most groveling, the
basest, and the most servile is always the most honored. If you take it into your
head to really want to perform your trade, you will be despised, hated, and perhaps
driven out; at best, you will be overwhelmed by improper treatment and supplanted
by all your comrades for having done your service in the trenches while they did
theirs in ladies' dressing rooms."
One strongly suspects that all these diverse employments will not be very much to
Emile's taste. "What?" he will say to me. "Have I forgotten the games of my
childhood? Have I lost my hands? Is my strength exhausted? Do I no longer know how
to work? Of what importance to me are all your fine employments and all men's silly
opinions? I know no other glory than being beneficent and just. I know no
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BOOK V
other happiness than living in independence with the one I love, earning my
appetite and my health every day by my work. All these complications you tell me
about hardly touch me. I want as all my property only a little farm in some corner
of the world. I shall use all my avarice to improve it, and I shall live without
worrying. Give me Sophie and my field—and I shall be rich."
"Yes, my friend, a woman and a field that belong to him are enough for the wise
man's happiness. But although these treasures are modest, they are not as common as
you think. You have found the rarer one. Let us now speak of the other.
"A field which is yours, dear Emile! And in what place will you choose it? In what
corner of the earth will you be able to say, 'Here I am master of myself and of the
land which belongs to me?' One knows where it is easy to get rich, but who knows
where one can get along without being rich? Who knows where one can live
independent and free, without needing to harm anyone and without fear of being
harmed? Do you believe that it is so easy to find the country where one is always
permitted to be a decent man? I agree that if there is any legitimate and sure
means of subsisting without intrigue, without involvements, and without dependence,
it is to live by cultivating one's own land with the labor of one's own hands. But
where is the state where a man can say to himself, 'The land I tread is mine'?
Before choosing this happy land, be well assured that you will find there the peace
you seek. Be careful that a violent government, a persecuting religion, or perverse
morals do not come to disturb you there. Shelter yourself from boundless taxes that
would devour the fruit of your efforts and from endless litigation that would
consume your estate. Arrange it so that, in living justly, you do not have to pay
court to administrators, their deputies, judges, priests, powerful neighbors, and
rascals of every kind, who are always ready to torment you if you neglect them.
Above all, shelter yourself from vexation by the noble and the rich. Keep in mind
that everywhere their lands can border on Naboth's vineyard.'10 If you are unlucky
enough to have a man of position buy or build a house near your cottage, can you be
sure that he will not find the means, under some pretext, to invade your
inheritance in order to round off his own, or that you will not see—perhaps
tomorrow—all your resources absorbed into a large highway? And if you preserve
influence in order to fend off all these problems, you might as well also preserve
your riches, for they are no costlier to keep. Wealth and influence mutually prop
each other up. The one is always poorly maintained without the other.
"I have more experience than you, dear Emile. I see the difficulty of your project
better. Nevertheless it is a fine and decent one which would really make you happy.
Let us make an effort to execute it. I have a proposition to make to you. Let us
consecrate the two years until your return to choosing an abode in Europe where you
can live happily with your family, sheltered from all the dangers of which I have
just spoken to you. If we succeed, you will have found the true happiness vainly
sought by so many others, and you will not regret the time you have spent. If we do
not succeed, you will be cured of a chimera. You
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will console yourself for an inevitable unhappiness, and you will submit yourself
to the law of necessity."
I do not know whether all my readers will perceive where this proposed research is
going to lead us. But I do know that if Emile, at the conclusion of his travels
begun and continued with this intention, does not come back versed in all matter of
government, in public morals, and in maxims of state of every kind, either he or I
must be quite poorly endowed—he with intelligence and I with judgment.
The science of political right is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it
never will be born. Grotius, the master of all our learned men in this matter, is
only a child and, what is worse, a child of bad faith. When I hear Grotius praised
to the skies and Hobbes covered with execration, I see how few sensible men read or
understand these two authors. The truth is that their principles are exactly alike.
They differ only in their manner of expression. They also differ in method. Hobbes
bases himself on sophisms, and Grotius on poets. They have everything else in
common.
The only modern in a position to create this great and useless science was the
illustrious Montesquieu. But he was careful not to discuss the principles of
political right. He was content to discuss the positive right of established
governments, and nothing in the world is more different than these two studies.
Nevertheless, whoever wants to make healthy judgments about existing governments is
obliged to unite the two. It is necessary to know what ought to be in order to
judge soundly about what is. The greatest difficulty in clarifying these important
matters is to interest an individual in discussing them by answering these two
questions: What importance does it have for me? and, What can I do about it? We
have put our Emile in a position to answer both questions for himself.
The second difficulty comes from the prejudices of childhood, from the maxims on
which one has been raised, and above all from the partiality of authors who always
speak of the truth—which they scarcely care about—but think only of their interest,
which they are silent about. Now, the people do not give chairs or pensions or
places in academies. You may judge how the peoples' rights are likely to be
protected by these men! I have done things in such a way that this is not yet a
difficulty for Emile. He hardly knows what government is. The only thing important
to him is to find the best one. His aim is not to write books, and if he ever does,
it will be not in order to pay court to the powers that be but to establish the
rights of humanity.
There remains a third difficulty which is more specious than solid and which I want
neither to resolve nor to pose. It is enough for me that it does not daunt my zeal,
since I am certain that in researches of this kind great talents are less necessary
than a sincere love of justice and a true respect for the truth. If matters of
government can be equitably treated, then I believe that the occasion for it is now
or never.
Before observing, one must make some rules for one's observations. One must
construct a standard to which measurements one makes can be related. Our principles
of political right are that standard. Our measurements are the political laws of
each country.
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BOOK V
Our elements are clear, simple, and taken immediately from the nature of things.
They will be formed from questions discussed between us, and we shall convert them
into principles only when they are sufficiently resolved.01
For example, by first going back to the state of nature, we shall examine whether
men are born enslaved or free, associated with one another or independent. Whether
they join together voluntarily or by force. Whether the force which joins them can
form a permanent right by which this prior force remains obligatory, even when it
is surmounted by another. If so, ever since the force of King Nimrod,!- who is said
to have subjected the first peoples, all the other forces which have destroyed
Nimrod's have been iniquitous and usurpatory, and there are no longer any
legitimate kings other than the descendants of Nimrod or his assignees. Or whether,
once this force has expired, the force which succeeds it becomes obligatory in turn
and destroys the obligation of the other, in such a way that one is only obliged to
obey as long as one is forced to do so and is dispensed from it as soon as one can
offer resistance—a right which, it seems, would not add very much to force and
would hardly be anything but a play on words.
We shall examine whether one cannot say that every illness comes from God, and
whether it follows from this that it is a crime to call the doctor.
We shall further examine whether conscience obliges one to give one's purse to a
bandit who demands it on the highway, even if one could hide it from him. For,
after all, the pistol he holds is also a power.
Whether the word power on this occasion means anything other than a legitimate
power, one that consequently is subject to the laws from which it gets its being.
Assuming that one rejects this right of force and accepts the right of nature, or
paternal authority, as the principle of societies, we shall investigate the extent
of that authority, how it is founded in nature, and whether it has any other ground
than the utility of the child, his weakness, and the natural love the father has
for him. Whether when the child's weaknesses comes to an end and his reason
matures, he does not therefore become the sole natural judge of what is suitable
for his preservation, and consequently his own master, as well as become
independent of every other man, even of his father. For it is even more certain
that the son loves himself than it is that the father loves his son.
Whether when the father dies, the children are obliged to obey the eldest among
them or someone else who will not have a father's natural attachment for them; and
whether there will always be a single chief in each clan whom the whole family is
obliged to obey. In which case we would investigate how the authority could ever be
divided, and by what right there would be more than one chief on the whole earth
governing mankind.
Assuming that peoples were formed by choice, we shall then distinguish right from
fact; since men have thus subjected themselves to their brothers, uncles, or
parents not because they were obliged to but because they wanted to, we shall ask
whether this sort of society is not always simply a case of free and voluntary
association.
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Moving next to the right of slavery, we shall examine whether a man can
legitimately alienate himself to another without restriction, without reserve,
without any kind of condition: that is to say, whether he can renounce his person,
his life, his reason, his I, and all morality in his actions—in a word, whether he
can cease to exist before his death in spite of nature, which gives him immediate
responsibility for his own preservation, and in spite of his conscience and his
reason, which prescribe to him what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain
from doing.
And if there is some reserve or restriction in the transaction of enslavement, we
shall discuss whether this transaction does not then become a true contract in
which each of the parties, having no common superior in this capacity,* remains his
own judge as to the conditions of the contract; and whether each consequently
remains free in this respect and master of breaking the contract as soon as he
considers himself injured.
If a slave, then, cannot alienate himself without reserve to his master, how can a
people alienate itself without reserve to its chief? And if the slave remains judge
of whether his master observes their contract, will the people not remain judge of
whether their chiefs observe their contract?
Forced to retrace our steps in this way, and examining the sense of the collective
word people, we shall investigate whether the establishment of a people does not
require at least a tacit contract prior to the one we are supposing.
Since the people is a people before electing a king, what made it such if not the
social contract? Therefore the social contract is the basis of every civil society,
and the nature of the society it forms must be sought in the nature of this
transaction.
We shall investigate what the tenor of this contract is and whether it can be
summed up in this formula: Each of us puts his goods, his person, his life, and all
his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we as a
body accept each member as a part indivisible from the whole.
Assuming this, we shall note, in order to define the terms we need, that this act
of association produces—in place of the particular person of each contracting party
—a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly has
voices. This public person, understood generally, takes the name body politic; its
members call it state when it is passive, sovereign when it is active, and power
when it is compared with other bodies politic. Speaking of the members collectively
they take the name people; individually they are called both citizens, as members
of the city or participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, as subject to
the same authority.
We shall note that this act of association contains a reciprocal commitment of the
public and the individuals, and that each individual,
* If they had one, this common superior would be none other than the sovereign; and
then the right of slavery would be founded on the right of sovereignty and would
not be its source.
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BOOK V
who is, so to speak, contracting with himself, is committed in two respects—as a
member of the sovereign, to the individuals; as a member of the state, to the
sovereign.
We shall further note that since no one is held to commitments made only with
himself, public deliberation—which can obligate all the subjects with respect to
the sovereign because of the two different relations in which each of them is
envisaged—cannot obligate the state to itself. From which one can see that there
neither is nor can be any other fundamental law properly speaking than the social
pact alone. This does not mean that the body politic cannot in certain respects
commit itself to another; for with respect to foreigners, it becomes a simple
being, an individual.
Since the two contracting parties—that is, each individual and the public—have no
common superior who can judge their differences, we shall examine whether each
party remains the master of breaking the contract when it pleases him—that is to
say, of renouncing it as soon as he believes himself injured.
In order to clarify this question, we shall observe that according to the social
pact the sovereign is able to act only by common and general wills and that
therefore its acts ought similarly to have only general and common objects. From
this it follows that an individual could not be directly injured by the sovereign
without everyone's being injured; but this cannot be, since it would be to want to
harm oneself. Thus the social contract never has need of any guarantee other than
the public force, because the injury can come only from individuals; and in that
case they are not thereby free from their commitment but are punished for having
violated it.
In order to decide all such questions, we shall be careful always to remind
ourselves that the social pact is of a particular and unique nature, in that the
people contracts only with itself—that is to say, the people as sovereign body
contracts with the individuals as subjects. This condition constitutes the whole
artifice of the political machine and sets it in motion. It alone renders
legitimate, reasonable, and free from danger commitments that otherwise would be
absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the most enormous abuses.
Inasmuch as the individuals have subjected themselves only to the sovereign, and
the sovereign authority is nothing other than the general will, we shall see how
each man who obeys the sovereign obeys only himself, and how one is more free under
the social pact than in the state of nature.
After having compared natural liberty to civil liberty with respect to persons, we
shall, with respect to possessions, compare the right of property with the right of
sovereignty, individual domain with eminent domain. If the sovereign authority is
founded on the right of property, this right is the one it ought to respect most.
The right of property is inviolable and sacred for the sovereign authority as long
as it remains a particular and individual right. But as soon as it is considered as
common to all the citizens, it is subject to the general will, and this will can
suppress it. Thus the sovereign has no right to touch the possessions
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of one or more individuals. But it can legitimately seize the possessions of all,
as was done at Sparta in the time of Lycurgus; the abolition of debts by Solon, on
the other hand, was an illegitimate act.03
Since nothing obligates the subjects except the general will, we shall investigate
how this will is manifested, by what signs one is sure of recognizing it, what a
law is, and what the true characteristics of law are. This subject is entirely new:
the definition of law remains to be made.
The moment the people considers one or more of its members individually, the people
is divided. A relation is formed between the whole and its part which makes them
into two separate beings: the part is one, and the whole, less this part, is the
other. But the whole less a part is not the whole. Therefore, as long as this
relation subsists, there is no longer a whole but two unequal parts.
By contrast, when the whole people makes a statute applying to the whole people, it
considers only itself; and if a relation is formed, it is between the whole object
seen from one point of view and the whole object seen from another point of view,
without any division of the whole. Then the object applying to which the statute is
made is general, and the will which makes the statute is also general. We shall
examine whether there is any other kind of act that can bear the name of law.
If the sovereign can speak only by laws, and if the law can never have anything but
a general object—one that relates equally to all the members of the state—it
follows that the sovereign never has the power to make any statute applying to a
particular object. But since it is important for the preservation of the state that
particular things also be decided, we shall investigate how that can be done.
The acts of the sovereign can only be acts of general will—that is, laws. There
must next be determining acts—acts of force or of government—for the execution of
these same laws, and these acts can have only particular objects. Thus the act by
which the sovereign decrees that a chief will be elected is a law, and the act by
which that chief is elected in execution of the law is only an act of government.
Here, then, is a third relation in which the assembled people can be considered—as
magistrate or executor of the law that it has declared in its capacity as
sovereign. *
We shall examine whether it is possible for the people to divest itself of its
right of sovereignty in order to vest that right in one or more men. For, since the
act of election is not a law, and in this act the people itself is not sovereign,
it is hard to see how it can transfer a right it does not have.
Inasmuch as the essence of sovereignty consists in the general will, it is also
hard to see how one can be certain that a particular will always will agree with
this general will. One ought rather to presume that the particular will will often
be contrary to the general will, for private interest always tends to preferences,
and the public interest
* Most of these questions and propositions are extracts from the treatise The
Social Contract, itself an extract from a larger work that was undertaken without
consulting my strength and has long since been abandoned. The little treatise I
have detached from it—of which this is the summary—will be published separately.
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BOOK V
always tends to equality. And even if such agreement were possible but not
necessary and indestructible, that would suffice for making it impossible for
sovereign right to result from it.
We shall investigate whether the chiefs of the people, under whatever name they may
be elected, can ever, without violating the social pact, be anything but officers
of the people whom the people direct to execute the laws; and whether these chiefs
owe the people an account of their administration and are themselves subject to the
laws whose observance they are charged with ensuring.
If the people cannot alienate its supreme right, can it entrust that right to
others for a time? If it cannot give itself a master, can it give itself
representatives? This question is important and merits discussion.
If the people can have neither a sovereign nor representatives, we shall examine
how it can declare its laws by itself; whether it ought to have many laws, whether
it ought to change them often, and whether it is easy for a large populace to be
its own legislator.
Whether the Roman populace was not a large populace.
Whether it is good to have large populaces.
It follows from the preceding considerations that within the state there is an
intermediate body between the subjects and the sovereign. This intermediate body,
which is formed of one or more members, is in charge of public administration, the
execution of the laws, and the maintenance of civil and political liberty.
The members of this body are called magistrates or kings—that is, governors. The
whole body is called prince when considered with regard to the men who compose it,
and government when considered with regard to its action.
If we consider the action of the whole body acting upon itself—that is, the
relation of the whole to the whole or of the sovereign to the state —we can compare
this relation to that of the extremes of a continuous proportion which has the
government as its middle term. The magistrate receives from the sovereign the
orders he gives to the people; and when everything is calculated, his product or
power is of the same magnitude as the product or power of the citizens, who are on
the one hand subjects and on the other sovereigns."4 None of the three terms could
be altered without immediately breaking the proportion. If the sovereign wants to
govern, or if the prince wants to give laws, or if the subject refuses to obey,
disorder replaces order, and the state is dissolved, falling into despotism or
anarchy.
Let us suppose the state to be composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can
be considered only collectively and as a body. But each individual, as a subject,
has a personal and independent existence. Thus the sovereign is to the subject as
ten thousand is to one. That is, each member of the state has only a ten-thousandth
part of the sovereign authority as his share, although he is totally subjected to
that authority. If the people is composed of one hundred thousand men, the
condition of the subjects does not change, and each always endures the whole empire
of the laws, but his suffrage, which is reduced to a one-hundred-thousandth share,
has ten times less influence in drawing up the laws. Thus, while the subject always
remains one, the ratio of the
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sovereign to the subject increases in proportion to the number of citizens. From
this it follows that the more the state expands, the more liberty diminishes.
Now, the less the particular wills correspond to the general will— that is, the
less morals correspond to laws—the more the repressing force ought to increase.
From another point of view, a larger state gives the depositories of public
authority greater temptations and more means for abusing them; therefore the more
force the government has in order to contain the people, the more force the
sovereign ought to have in order to contain the government.
It follows from this double relation that the continuous proportion among the
sovereign, the prince, and the people is not an arbitrary idea but a consequence of
the nature of the state. Further, it follows that since one of the extremes—that
is, the people—is fixed, every time the doubled ratio increases or decreases, the
simple ratio increases or decreases in turn, which cannot happen without the mean
term changing the same number of times.""' From this we can draw the conclusion
that there is not a single and absolute constitution of government, but that there
ought to be as many governments differing in nature as there are states differing
in size.
If it is the case that the more numerous the people are, the less morals correspond
to the laws, we shall examine whether, by an evident enough analogy, it can also be
said that the more numerous the magistrates are, the weaker the government is.
In order to clarify this maxim, we shall distinguish three essentially different
wills in the person of each magistrate. First, there is the personal will of the
individual, which is directed only to his own particular advantage. Second, there
is the common will of the magistrates, which relates solely to the profit of the
prince; this will can be called the "will de corps," m which is general in relation
to the government and particular in relation to the state of which the government
is a part. In the third place, there is the will of the people or the sovereign
will, which is general both in relation to the state considered as the whole and in
relation to the government considered as part of the whole. Where there is perfect
legislation, the particular and individual will ought to be almost nonexistent, and
the will de corps belonging to the government ought to be very subordinate;
consequently the general and sovereign will is the standard for all the others.
However, according to the natural order, these different wills become more active
to the extent that they are concentrated. The general will is always the weakest,
the will de corps has the second rank, and the particular will is preferred over
all others. The result is that each man is first of all himself, and then a
magistrate, and then a citizen—a gradation directly opposed to that which the
social order demands.
Once this has been granted, we shall suppose the government in the hands of a
single man. Here the particular will and the will de corps are perfectly united,
and consequently the latter has the highest degree of intensity it can have. Now,
since the use of force depends on this degree of intensity, and since the absolute
force of the government
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BOOK V
—which is always that of the people—does not vary, it follows that the most active
government is that of a single man.
Alternatively, let us unite the government to the supreme authority, making the
sovereign into the prince and the citizens into so many magistrates. Then the will
de corps, which is perfectly confounded with the general will, will not be more
active than the general will and will leave the particular will with all its force.
Thus the government, although it always possesses the same absolute force, will be
at its minimum level of activity.
These rules are incontestable, and other considerations serve to confirm them. For
example, one sees that the magistrates are more active in the body of magistrates
than the citizen is in the citizen body. Consequently the particular will has much
more influence in the body of magistrates, for each magistrate is almost always in
charge of some particular function of government, while each citizen, taken
separately, has no particular function of sovereignty. Furthermore, the more the
state expands, the more its real force increases, although it does not increase in
proportion to its extent. But when the state remains the same, it is vain to
multiply the number of magistrates; the government does not thereby acquire a
greater real force, because it is the depository of the state's force which we are
supposing is still the same. Thus, as a result of the greater number of
magistrates, the government's activity decreases without its force being able to
increase.
After having found that the government slackens to the extent that the magistrates
multiply, and that the more people there are the more the repressive force of the
government ought to increase, we shall conclude that the ratio of magistrates to
government ought to be inverse to that of subjects to sovereign. In other words,
the more the state expands, the more the government ought to contract, so that the
number of chiefs decreases in proportion to the increase in the size of the people.
Next, in order to fix this diversity of forms under more precise denominations, we
first shall note that the sovereign can entrust the government to the whole people
or to the greater part of the people, so that there are more citizens who are
magistrates than citizens who are simple individuals. The name democracy is given
to this form of government.
Or it can confine the government in the hands of a lesser number, so that there are
more simple citizens than magistrates. This form bears the name aristocracy.
Finally, it can concentrate the whole government in the hands of a single
magistrate. This third form is the most common and is called monarchy or royal
government.
We shall note that all these forms—or at least the first two—are susceptible to
degrees of more and less, and even have a rather great latitude in this respect.
Democracy can embrace the whole people or can be confined to as little as half of
it. Aristocracy, in turn, can be confined to any number from half the people down
to the smallest group. Even royalty someimes admits of division, whether between
father and son or beween two brothers, or otherwise. There were always two kings in
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Sparta, and up to eight emperors were seen at the same time in the Roman Empire
without its being possible to say that the empire was divided.67 There is a point
where each form of government is confounded with the next one; and under these
three specific denominations government is really capable of as many forms as the
state has citizens.
What is more, since each of these governments can be subdivided in certain respects
into diverse parts—with one administered in one way and another in another way—the
combinations of these three forms can give rise to a multitude of mixed forms, each
of which is multi-pliable by all the simple forms.
There has always been much dispute about the best form of government, without its
being considered that each is best in certain cases and worst in certain others.
But if the number of magistrates * in the different states ought to be inverse to
the number of citizens, we shall conclude that generally democratic government is
suitable for small states, aristocratic government for medium-sized states, and
monarchic government for large states.
By following the thread of these researches, we shall come to know what the duties
and the rights of citizens are, and whether the former can be separated from the
latter. We shall also learn what the fatherland is, precisely what it consists in,
and how each person can know whether or not he has a fatherland.
Once we have thus considered each species of civil society in itself, we shall
compare them in order to observe their diverse relations: some large, others small;
some strong, others weak; attacking, resisting, and destroying one another, and in
this continual action and reaction, responsible for more misery and loss of life
than if men had all kept their initial freedom. We shall examine whether the
establishment of society accomplished too much or too little; whether individuals—
who are subject to laws and to men, while societies among themselves maintain the
independence of nature—remain exposed to the ills of both conditions without having
their advantages; and whether it would be better to have no civil society in the
world than to have many. Is it not this mixed condition which participates in both
and secures neither per quern neutrum licet, nee tanquan in hello paratum esse, nee
tan-quam in pace securum? 68 Is it not this partial and imperfect association which
produces tyranny and war; and are not tyranny and war the greatest plagues of
humanity?
Finally, we shall examine the kind of remedies for these disadvantages provided by
leagues and confederations, which leave each state its own master within but arm it
against every unjust aggressor from without. We shall investigate how a good
federative association can be established, what can make it durable, and how far
the right of confederation can be extended without jeopardizing that of
sovereignty.
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre proposed an association of all the states of Europe in
order to maintain perpetual peace among them. Was this association feasible? And if
it had been established, can it be presumed that
* It will be remembered that I mean to speak here only of supreme magistrates or
chiefs of the nation; the others are only their substitutes in this or that
function.
[466]
BOOK V
it would have lasted? * These investigations lead us directly to all the questions
of public right which can complete the clarification of the questions of political
right.
Finally, we shall lay down the true principles of the right of war, and we shall
examine why Grotius and the others presented only false ones.
I would not be surprised if my young man, who has good sense, were to interrupt me
in the middle of all our reasoning and say, "Someone might say that we are building
our edifice with wood and not with men, so exactly do we align each piece with the
ruler!" "It is true, my friend, but keep in mind that right is not bent by men's
passions, and that our first concern was to establish the true principles of
political right. Now that our foundations are laid, come and examine what men have
built on them; and you will see some fine things!"
Then I make him read Telemachus while proceeding on his journey. We seek the happy
Salente and the good Idomeneus, made wise by dint of misfortunes. On our way we
find many Protesilauses, and no Philocles. Adrastus, king of the Dorians, is also
not impossible to find.70 But let us leave the readers to imagine our travels—or to
make them in our stead with Telemachus in hand; and let us not suggest to them
invidious comparisons that the author himself dismisses or makes in spite of
himself.
Besides, since Emile is not a king and I am not a god, we do not fret about not
being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that they did for men. No
one knows better than we do how to keep in our place, and no one has less desire to
leave it. We know that the same task is given to all, and that whoever loves the
good with all his heart and does it with all his power has fulfilled his task. We
know that Telemachus and Mentor are chimeras. Emile does not travel as an idle man,
and he does more good than if he were a prince. If we were kings, we would no
longer be beneficent. If we were kings and were beneficent, we would do countless
real evils without knowing it for the sake of an apparent good that we believed we
were doing. If we were kings and were wise, the first good thing that we would want
to do for ourselves and others would be to abdicate our royal position and become
again what we are.
I have said why travel is not fruitful for everyone. What makes it still more
unfruitful for young people is the way they are made to do it. Governors, who are
more interested in their own entertainment than in their pupils' instruction, lead
them from city to city, from palace to palace, from social circle to social circle;
or, if the governors are learned and men of letters, they make their pupils spend
their time roaming libraries, visiting antique shops, going through old monuments,
and transcribing old inscriptions. In each country the pupils are involved with
another century. It is as if they were involved with another country. The result is
that, after having roamed Europe at great expense, abandoned to frivolities or
boredom, they return without hav-
* Since I wrote this, the arguments for have been expounded in the extract from the
Abbe's project; the arguments against—at least those which appeared solid to me—are
to be found in the collection of my writings that follows this extract.6"
[467]
EMILE
ing seen anything which can interest them or learned anything which can be useful
to them.
All capitals resemble one another. All peoples are mixed together in them, and all
morals are confounded. It is not to capitals that one must go to study nations.
Paris and London are but the same city in my eyes. Their inhabitants have some
different prejudices, but an equal share of them, and all their practical maxims
are the same. One knows what kinds of men must gather in courts and what morals
must everywhere be produced by the crowding together of the people and the
inequality of fortunes. As soon as I am told of a city of two hundred thousand
souls, I know beforehand how people live there. Whatever else I would find out on
the spot is not worth the effort of going to learn.
One must go to the remote provinces—where there is less movement and commerce,
where foreigners travel less, where the inhabitants move around less and change
fortune and status less—in order to study the genius and the morals of a nation.
See the capital in passing, but go far away from it to observe the country. The
French are not in Paris, they are in Touraine. The English are more English in
Mercia than in London, and the Spanish are more Spanish in Galicia than in Madrid.
It is at these great distances from the capital that a people reveals its character
and shows itself as it is without admixture. There the good and bad effects of the
government are more strongly felt, just as the measurement of arcs is more exact at
the end of a longer radius.
The necessary relations between morals and government have been so well expounded
in the book The Spirit of the Laws that one can do no better than have recourse to
this work to study these relations. But in general, there are two easy and simple
rules for judging the relative goodness of governments. One is population. In every
country which is becoming depopulated the state is tending toward its ruin; and the
country which has the highest rate of population growth, even if it is the poorest,
is infallibly the best governed.71
But for this to be the case, it is necessary that the size of a country's
population be a natural effect of its government and morals. For if population
growth is accomplished by bringing in colonists or by other accidental and
temporary means, they would prove the disease by the need for the remedy. When
Augustus proclaimed laws against celibacy, these laws already showed the decline of
the Roman Empire.72 It is necessary that the goodness of the government incline the
citizens to marry rather than that the law constrain them to do so. One should not
examine what is done by force; for the law which combats the constitution is evaded
and becomes vain. Instead, one should examine what is accomplished by the influence
of morals and by the natural bent of the government, for these means alone have a
constant effect. It was the policy of the good Abbe de Saint-Pierre always to seek
a small remedy for each individual ill instead of going back to a common source and
seeing that all the ills can only be cured together. It is a matter not of treating
separately each ulcer that appears on a sick man's body but of purging the bulk of
the blood that produces all the ulcers. It is said that in England there are prizes
for agriculture. I need no more evidence. That alone proves to me that agriculture
will not flourish there for long.
[468]
BOOK V
The second sign of the relative goodness of government and laws is also drawn from
population, but in another way—namely, from its distribution, and not from its
quantity. Two states equal in size and in the number of men can be very unequal in
strength; and the most powerful of the two is always the one whose inhabitants are
most evenly distributed over its territory. The one which does not have such big
cities, and which is consequently less brilliant, will always defeat the other. It
is big cities which exhaust a state and cause its weakness. The wealth they produce
is only apparent and illusory—a lot of money that has little effect. It is said
that the city of Paris is worth a province to the king of France. I believe that it
costs him several, that Paris is fed by the provinces in more than one respect, and
that most of their revenues are paid out in this city and stay there without ever
returning to the people or the king. It is inconceivable that in this age of
calculators there is none who can perceive that France would be much more powerful
if Paris were annihilated. The uneven distribution of the people is not only
disadvantageous to the state, it is even more ruinous than depopulation itself; for
depopulation results only in a product which is nonexistent, whereas badly arranged
consumption results in a negative product. When I hear a Frenchman and an
Englishman, very proud of the size of their capitals, disputing between them
whether Paris or London contains the most inhabitants, it seems to me as though
they were disputing together about which of the two peoples has the honor of being
the worst governed.
Study a people outside of its cities; it is only in this way that you will know it.
You gain nothing by seeing the apparent form of a government disguised by the
machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators if you do not also
study its nature by the effects it produces on the people and throughout all the
levels of administration. Since the difference between form and substance is
distributed throughout all the levels, it is only by embracing them all that this
difference is known. In one country you begin to sense the spirit of the ministry
by the maneuvers of the subdelegates. In another you have to see the members of
parliament elected in order to judge whether it is true that the nation is free. In
no land whatever is it possible for someone who has seen only the cities to know
the government, given that its spirit is never the same in the city and the
country. Now, it is the country which constitutes the land, and it is the people of
the country who constitute the nation.
This study of diverse peoples in their remote provinces and in the simplicity of
their original genius results in a general observation quite favorable to my
epigraph ™ and quite consoling to the human heart. It is that all nations appear
much better when they are observed in this way. The closer they are to nature, the
more their character is dominated by goodness. It is only by closing themselves up
in cities and corrupting themselves by means of culture that they become depraved
and exchange a few defects that are more coarse than harmful for appealing and
pernicious vices.
From this observation there results a new advantage for the way of traveling I
propose. By sojourning less in big cities where a horrible
[469]
EMILE
corruption reigns, young people are less exposed to being corrupted themselves.
Among simpler men and in smaller societies they preserve a surer judgment, a
healthier taste, and more decent morals. But in any event, this contagion is hardly
to be feared for my Emile. He has all that is needed to guarantee him against it.
Among all the precautions I have taken in this respect I give great weight to the
attachment he bears in his heart.
People no longer know what true love is capable of doing to the inclinations of
young people because those who govern them, understanding true love no better than
their pupils do, turn them away from it. Nevertheless, a young man must either love
or be debauched. It is easy to deceive by appearances. Countless young people will
be cited who are said to live very chastely without love. But let someone name to
me a grown man who is truly a man and who says in good faith that he has spent his
youth this way. In regard to all the virtues and all our duties only the appearance
is sought. I seek the reality, and I am mistaken if there are other means of
getting at it than those I give.
The idea of getting Emile to fall in love before making him travel is not my
invention. Here is the incident which suggested it to me.
I was in Venice visiting the governor of a young Englishman. It was winter, and we
were sitting around the fire. The governor received his letters from the post. He
read them and then reread one letter aloud to his pupil. It was in English, and I
understood none of it. But during the reading I saw the young man tear off the very
fine lace cuffs he was wearing and throw them one after the other into the fire. He
did this as gently as he could so as not to be noticed. Surprised by this caprice,
I looked him in the face and believed I saw some emotion there. But the external
signs of the passions, which are quite similar in all men, nonetheless have
national differences about which it is easy to be mistaken. Peoples have diverse
languages on their faces as well as in their mouths. I awaited the end of the
reading; then I showed the governor his pupil's naked wrists—which the young man
nevertheless did his best to hide—and I said, "Is it possible for me to know what
this means?"
The governor, seeing what had happened, started laughing and embraced his pupil
with an air of satisfaction. After having obtained the latter's consent, he gave me
the explanation I wished.
"The cuffs which Monsieur John has just torn off," he said to me, "are a present
given to him by a lady of this city not long ago. Now you should know that Monsieur
John is promised to a young lady in his country whom he loves very much and who
deserves his love even more. This letter is from his beloved's mother, and I am
going to translate for you the passage which caused the damage you witnessed.
" 'Lucy does not cease working on Lord John's cuffs. Miss Betty Roldham came
yesterday to spend the afternoon with her and insisted on joining in her work.
Knowing that Lucy had risen earlier today than usual, I wanted to see what she was
doing, and I found her busy undoing all that Miss Betty had done yesterday. She
does not want a single stitch in her gift to be done by a hand other than her own.'
"
Monsieur John went out a moment later to put on other cuffs, and
[470]
BOOK V
I said to his governor, "You have a pupil with an excellent nature. But tell me the
truth, wasn't the letter from Miss Lucy's mother arranged? Is it not an expedient
you devised against the lady of the cuffs?" "No," he answered, "the thing is real.
I have not put so much art in my efforts. I have made them with simplicity and
zeal, and God has blessed my work."
The incident involving this young man did not leave my memory. It was not apt to
produce nothing in the head of a dreamer like me.
It is time to finish. Let us take Lord John back to Miss Lucy—that is to say, Emile
back to Sophie. With a heart no less tender than it was before his departure, Emile
brings back to her a more enlightened mind, and he brings back to his country the
advantage of having known governments by all their vices and peoples by all their
virtues. I have even seen to it that in each nation he is connected with some man
of merit by a treaty of hospitality, after the fashion of the ancients. I would not
be vexed if he were to cultivate these acquaintances by an exchange of letters. Not
only is it sometimes useful and always agreeable to carry on correspondences with
distant countries, but it is also an excellent precaution against the empire of
national prejudices which attack us throughout life and sooner or later get some
hold on us. Nothing is more likely to deprive such prejudices of their hold than
disinterested interchange with sensible people whom one esteems. Since they do not
have our prejudices and combat them with their own, they give us the means to pit
one set of prejudices unceasingly against the other and thus to guarantee ourselves
from them all. It is not the same thing to associate with foreigners in our country
as it is in theirs. In the former case they always have a certain discretion about
the country where they are living which makes them disguise what they think of it
or which makes them think favorably of it while they are there. When they get back
home, they reconsider and are merely just. I would be quite glad if the foreigner
whom I consult had seen my country, but I will only ask him his opinion of it in
his own country.
After having employed almost two years in roaming some of the great states of
Europe and more of the small ones, after having learned Europe's two or three
principal languages, and after having seen what is truly worthy of curiosity—
whether in natural history, or in government, or in arts, or in men—Emile is
devoured by impatience and warns me that the end is approaching. Then I say to him,
"Well, my friend, you remember the principal object of our travels. You have seen
and observed. What is the final result of your observations? What course have you
chosen?" Either I am mistaken in my method, or he will answer me pretty nearly as
follows:
"What course have I chosen! To remain what you have made me and voluntarily to add
no other chain to the one with which nature and the laws burden me. The more I
examine the work of men in their institutions, the more I see that they make
themselves slaves by dint of wanting to be independent and that they use up their
freedom in vain efforts to ensure it. In order not to yield to the torrent of
things, they
[47i]
EMILE
involve themselves in countless attachments. Then as soon as they want to take a
step, they cannot and are surprised at depending on everything. It seems to me that
in order to make oneself free, one has to do nothing. It suffices that one not want
to stop being free. It is you, my master, who have made me free in teaching me to
yield to necessity. Let it come when it pleases. I let myself be carried along
without constraint, and since I do not wish to fight it, I do not attach myself to
anything to hold me back. In our travels I have sought to find some piece of land
where I could be absolutely on my own. But in what place among men does one not
depend on their passions? All things considered, I have found that my very wish was
contradictory; for, were I dependent on nothing else, I would at least depend on
the land where I had settled. My life would be attached to this land like that of
dryads was to their trees. I have found that dominion and liberty are two
incompatible words; therefore, I could be master of a cottage only in ceasing to be
master of myself.
Hoc erat in votis modus agri non ita magnus.''4
"I remember that my property was the cause of our investigations. You proved very
solidly that I could not keep my wealth and my freedom at the same time. But when
you wanted me to be free and without needs at the same time, you wanted two
incompatible things, for I could withdraw myself from dependence on man only by
returning to dependence on nature. What will I do then with the fortune my parents
left me? I shall begin by not depending on it. I shall loosen all the bonds which
attach me to it. If it is left with me, it will stay with with me. If it is taken
from me, I shall not be carried along with it. I shall not worry about holding on
to it, but I shall remain firmly in my place. Rich or poor, I shall be free. I
shall not be free in this or that land, in this or that region; I shall be free
everywhere on earth. All the chains of opinion are broken for me; I know only those
of necessity. I learned to bear these chains from my birth, and I shall bear them
until my death, for I am a man. And why would I not know how to bear them as a free
man since, if I were a slave, I would still have to bear them and those of slavery
to boot?
"What difference does it make to me what my position on earth is? What difference
does it make to me where I am? Wherever there are men, I am at the home of my
brothers; wherever there are no men, I am in my own home. As long as I can remain
independent and rich, I have property to live on, and I shall live. When my
property subjects me, I shall abandon it without effort. I have arms for working,
and I shall live. When my arms fail me, I shall live if I am fed, and I shall die
if I am abandoned. I shall also die even if I am not abandoned. For death is not a
punishment for poverty but a law of nature. At whatever time death comes, I defy
it. It will never surprise me while I am making preparations to live. It will never
prevent me from having lived.
"This, my father, is my chosen course. If I were without passions, I would, in my
condition as a man, be independent like God himself; for I would want only what is
and therefore would never have to struggle against destiny. At least I have no more
than one chain. It is the only one
[472]
BOOK V
I shall ever bear, and I can glory in it. Come, then, give me Sophie, and I am
free."
"Dear Emile, I am very glad to hear a man's speeches come from your mouth and to
see a man's sentiments in your heart. This extravagant disinterestedness does not
displease me at your age. It will decrease when you have children, and you will
then be precisely what a good father of a family and a wise man ought to be. Before
your travels I knew what their effect would be. I knew that when you looked at our
institutions from close up, you would hardly gain a confidence in them which they
do not merit. One aspires in vain to liberty under the safeguard of the laws. Laws!
Where are there laws, and where are they respected? Everywhere you have seen only
individual interest and men's passions reigning under this name. But the eternal
laws of nature and order do exist. For the wise man, they take the place of
positive law. They are written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason.
It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free. The only slave
is the man who does evil, for he always does it in spite of himself. Freedom is
found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it
with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere. The latter would
be a slave in Geneva, the former a free man in Paris.
"If I were speaking to you of the duties of the citizen, you would perhaps ask me
where the fatherland is, and you would believe you had confounded me. But you would
be mistaken, dear Emile, for he who does not have a fatherland at least has a
country. In any event, he has lived tranquilly under a government and the simulacra
of laws. What difference does it make that the social contract has not been
observed, if individual interest protected him as the general will would have done,
if public violence guaranteed him against individual violence, if the evil he saw
done made him love what is good, and if our institutions themselves have made him
know and hate their own iniquities? O Emile, where is the good man who owes nothing
to his country? Whatever country it is, he owes it what is most precious to man —
the morality of his actions and the love of virtue. If he had been born in the
heart of the woods, he would have lived happier and freer. But he would have had
nothing to combat in order to follow his inclinations, and thus he would have been
good without merit; he would not have been virtuous; and now he knows how to be so
in spite of his passions. The mere appearance of order brings him to know order and
to love it. The public good, which serves others only as a pretext, is a real
motive for him alone. He learns to struggle with himself, to conquer himself, to
sacrifice his interest to the common interest. It is not true that he draws no
profit from the laws. They give him the courage to be just even among wicked men.
It is not true that they have not made him free. They have taught him to reign over
himself.
"Do not ask then, 'What difference does it make to me where I am?' It makes a
difference to you that you are where you can fulfill all your duties, and one of
those duties is an attachment to the place of your birth. Your compatriots
protected you as a child; you ought to love them
[473]
EMILE
as a man. You ought to live amidst them, or at least in a place where you can be
useful to them insofar as you can, and where they know where to get you if they
ever have need of you. There are circumstances in which a man can be more useful to
his fellow citizens outside of his fatherland than if he were living in its bosom.
Then he ought to listen only to his zeal and to endure his exile without grumbling.
This exile itself is one of his duties. But you, good Emile, on whom nothing
imposes these painful sacrifices, you who have not taken on the sad job of telling
the truth to men, go and live in their midst, cultivate their friendship in sweet
association, be their benefactor and their model. Your example will serve them
better than all our books, and the good they see you do will touch them more than
all our vain speeches.
"I do not exhort you to go to live in the big cities for this purpose. On the
contrary, one of the examples good men ought to give others is that of the
patriarchal and rustic life, man's first life, which is the most peaceful, the most
natural, and the sweetest life for anyone who does not have a corrupt heart. Happy
is the country, my young friend, where one does not need to seek peace in a desert!
But where is this country? A beneficent man can hardly satisfy his inclination in
the midst of cities. There he finds he can exercise his zeal almost only on behalf
of schemers or rascals. The greeting that cities give to the idlers who come there
to hunt their fortunes succeeds only in completing the devastation of the country
which instead ought to be repopulated at the expense of the cities. All men who
withdraw from the hub of society are useful precisely because they withdraw from
it, since all its vices come from its being overpopulated. They are even more
useful when they can bring life, cultivation, and the love of their first state to
forsaken places. I am moved by contemplating how many benefactions Emile and Sophie
can spread around them from their simple retreat, and how much they can vivify the
country and reanimate the extinguished zeal of the unfortunate village folk. I
believe I see the people multiplying, the fields being fertilized, the earth taking
on a new adornment. The crowd and the abundance transform work into festivals, and
cries of joy and benedictions arise from the midst of the games which center on the
lovable couple who brought them back to life. The golden age is treated as a
chimera, and it will always be one for anyone whose heart and taste have been
spoiled. It is not even true that people regret the golden age, since those regrets
are always hollow. What, then, would be required to give it a new birth? One single
but impossible thing: to love it.
"It seems to be already reborn around Sophie's dwelling. You will do no more than
complete together what her worthy parents have begun. But, dear Emile, do not let
so sweet a life make you regard painful duties with disgust, if such duties are
ever imposed on you. Remember that the Romans went from the plow to the consulate.
If the prince or the state calls you to the service of the fatherland, leave
everything to go to fulfill the honorable function of citizen in the post assigned
to you. If this function is onerous to you, there is a decent and sure means to
free yourself from it—to fulfill it with enough integrity so that it will
[474]
BOOK V
not be left to you for long. Besides, you need have little fear of being burdened
with such a responsibility. As long as there are men who belong to the present age,
you are not the man who will be sought out to serve the state."
Why am I not permitted to paint Emile's return to Sophie and the conclusion of
their love or rather the beginning of the conjugal love which unites them—love
founded on esteem which lasts as long as life, on virtues which do not fade with
beauty, on suitability of character which makes association pleasant and prolongs
the charm of the first union into old age? But all these details might be pleasing
without being useful, and up to now I have permitted myself only those agreeable
details which I believed were of some utility. Shall I abandon this rule at the end
of my task? No; I also feel that my pen is weary. I am too weak for works requiring
so much endurance and would abandon this one if it were less advanced. In order not
to leave it imperfect, it is time for me to finish.
Finally I see dawning the most charming of Emile's days and the happiest of mine. I
see my attentions consummated, and I begin to taste their fruit. An indissoluble
chain unites the worthy couple. Their mouths pronounce and their hearts confirm
vows which will not be vain. They are wed. In returning from the temple, they let
themselves be led. They do not know where they are, where they are going, or what
is done around them. They do not hear; they respond only with confused words; their
clouded eyes no longer see anything. O delirium! O human weakness! The sentiment of
happiness crushes man. He is not strong enough to bear it.
There are very few people who know how to adopt a suitable tone with newly-weds on
their wedding day. The gloomy propriety of some and the light remarks of others
seem equally out of place to me. I would prefer to let these young hearts turn in
on themselves and yield to an agitation that is not without charm rather than to
cruelly distract them in order to make them gloomy by a false seemliness or
embarrass them by tasteless jokes. For even if such jokes were to please at all
other times, they would very surely be importunate on such a day.
In the sweet languor which excites them, my two young people seem to hear none of
the speeches made to them. Would I, who want every day of life to be enjoyed, let
them lose such a precious one? No, I want them to taste it, to savor it, and to
enjoy its delight by themselves. I tear them away from the tactless crowd harassing
them and take them for a walk. I bring them back to themselves by speaking to them
about themselves. I wish to speak not only to their ears but to their hearts. I am
not ignorant of the sole subject which can occupy them on this day.
Taking them both by the hand, I say to them, "My children, three years ago I saw
the birth of this lively and pure flame which causes your happiness today. It has
grown constantly. I see in your eyes that it is at its highest degree of intensity.
It can only become weaker." Readers, do you not see Emile's transports, his fury,
his vows; do you not see the disdainful air with which Sophie disengages her hand
from
[4751
EMILE
mine and the tender protestations they make to each other with their eyes that they
will adore each other until their last breath? I let them go on, and then I
continue.
"I have often thought that if one could prolong the happiness of love in marriage,
one would have paradise on earth. Up to now, that has never been seen. But if the
thing is not utterly impossible, you both are quite worthy of setting an example
that you will not have been given by anyone and that few couples will know how to
imitate. Do you want me to tell you, my children, a means which I imagine can
achieve that, a means which I believe to be the only possible one?"
They look at each other, smiling and making fun of my simplicity. Emile thanks me
curtly for my recipe, saying he believes Sophie has a better one, and that so far
as he is concerned, that one is enough for him. Sophie approves his response and
appears just as confident. However, beneath her mocking manner I believe I detect a
bit of curiosity. I examine Emile. His ardent eyes devour the charms of his wife.
This is the only thing he is curious about, and all my remarks do not upset him at
all. I smile in turn, saying to myself, "I shall soon be able to make you
attentive."
The almost imperceptible difference between these secret emotions is the sign of a
most characteristic difference between the two sexes, one quite contrary to the
received prejudices. It is that men generally are less constant than women and grow
weary of happy love sooner than they do. The woman has a presentiment of the man's
inconstancy and is uneasy about it. This is also what makes her more jealous. When
he begins to become lukewarm, she is forced, in order to keep him, to give him all
the attentions he formerly gave to her; she cries and she humiliates herself in her
turn, but rarely with the same success. Attachment and attentions win hearts, but
they rarely regain them. I return to my recipe against the cooling off of love in
marriage.
"The means is simple and easy," I continue. "It is to go on being lovers when one
is married." "Quite so," Emile says, laughing secretly. "It won't be hard for us."
"It will be harder for you who are doing the talking than you may think. I beg you,
give me the time to explain myself.
"Knots that one wants to tighten too much will burst. This is what happens to the
marriage knot when one wants to give it more strength than it ought to have. The
fidelity it imposes on the two spouses is the holiest of all rights, but the power
it gives to each of the two over the other is too great. Constraint and love go ill
together, and pleasure is not be to be commanded. Do not blush, Sophie, and do not
think of fleeing. God forbid that I should want to offend your modesty. But the
destiny of your life is at issue. For so great a matter, tolerate speech between a
husband and a father that you would not tolerate elsewhere.
"It is not so much possession as subjection which satiates, and a man stays
attached to a kept woman far longer than to a wife. How could a duty be made of the
tenderest caresses and a right be made of the sweetest proofs of love? It is mutual
desire which constitutes the right. Nature knows no other. Law can restrict this
right, but it cannot extend it. Voluptuousness is so sweet in itself! Should it
receive from
[476]
BOOK V
painful constraint the strength it could not draw from its own attractions? No, my
children, hearts are bound in marriage, but bodies are not enslaved. You owe each
other fidelity, not compliance. Each of you ought to belong only to the other. But
neither of you ought to be the other's more than he pleases.
"If it is true, then, dear Emile, that you want to be your wife's lover, let her
always be your mistress and her own. Be a fulfilled but respectful lover. Obtain
everything from love without demanding anything from duty, and always regard
Sophie's least favors not as your right but as acts of grace. I know that modesty
flees formal confessions and asks to be conquered. But does the lover who has
delicacy and true love make mistakes about his beloved's secret will? Is he unaware
when her heart and her eyes accord what her mouth feigns to refuse? Let each of you
always remain master of his own person and his caresses and have the right to
dispense them to the other only at his own will. Always remember that even in
marriage pleasure is legitimate only when desire is shared. Do not fear, my
children, that this law will keep you at a distance. On the contrary, it will make
both of you more attentive to pleasing each other, and it will prevent satiety.
Since you are limited solely to each other, nature and love will bring you
sufficiently close together."
Upon hearing these remarks and others of the kind, Emile becomes irritated and
protests. Sophie is ashamed; she holds her fan over her eyes and says nothing. The
most discontented of the two is perhaps not the one who complains the most. I
insist pitilessly. I make Emile blush at his lack of delicacy. I stand as guarantor
for Sophie's accepting the treaty on her side. I provoke her to speak. One can
easily guess that she does not dare to give me the lie. Emile uneasily consults the
eyes of his young wife. He sees that beneath their embarrassment they are full of a
voluptuous agitation which reassures him about the risk he takes in trusting her.
He throws himself at her feet, ecstatically kisses the hand she extends to him, and
swears that, with the exception of the promised fidelity, he renounces every other
right over her. "Dear wife," he says to her, "be the arbiter of my pleasures as you
are of my life and my destiny. Were your cruelty to cost me my life, I would
nonetheless give to you my dearest rights. I want to owe nothing to your
compliance. I want to get everything from your heart."
Good Emile, reassure yourself: Sophie is too generous herself to let you die a
victim of your generosity.
That evening, when I am ready to leave them, I say to them in the gravest tone
possible for me, "Remember, both of you, that you are free, and that the question
here is not one of marital duties. Believe me, let there be no false deference.
Emile, do you want to come with me? Sophie gives you permission." Emile is in a
fury and would like to hit me. "And you, Sophie, what do you say about it? Should I
take him away?" The liar, blushing, says yes. How charming and sweet a lie, worth
more than the truth!
The next day . . . The image of felicity no longer attracts men. The corruption of
vice has depraved their taste as much as it has depraved their hearts. They no
longer know how to sense what is touching nor
[477]
EMILE
how to see what is lovable. You who wish to paint voluptuousness and can only
imagine satisfied lovers swimming in the bosom of delights, how imperfect your
paintings still are! You have captured only the coarsest half of it. The sweetest
attractions of voluptuousness are not there. O who among you has never seen a young
couple, united under happy auspices, leaving the nuptial bed? Their languid and
chaste glances express all at once the intoxication of the sweet pleasures they
have just tasted, the lovable assurance of innocence, and the certitude— then so
charming—of spending the rest of their days together. This is the most ravishing
object which can be presented to man's heart. This is the true painting of
voluptuousness! You have seen it a hundred times without recognizing it. Your
hardened hearts are no longer capable of loving it. Sophie is happy and peaceful,
and she passes the day in the arms of her tender mother. This is a very sweet rest
to take after having passed the night in the arms of a husband.
On the day after that, I already perceive some change of scene. Emile wants to
appear a bit discontented. But beneath this affectation I note such tender
eagerness and even such submissiveness that I augur nothing very distressing. As
for Sophie, she is gayer than the day before. I see satisfaction gleaming in her
eyes. She is charming with Emile. She is almost flirtatious with him, which only
vexes him more.
These changes are hardly noticeable, but they do not escape me. I am uneasy about
them. I question Emile in private. I learn that, to his great regret and in spite
of all his appeals, he had had to sleep in a separate bed the previous night. The
imperious girl had hastened to make use of her right. Explanations are given. Emile
complains bitterly, and Sophie responds with jests. But finally, seeing him about
to get really angry, she gives him a glance full of sweetness and love; and,
squeezing my hand, she utters only these two words, but in a tone which goes
straight to the soul: "The ingrate!" Emile is so dumb that he understands none of
this. I understand it. I send Emile away, and now I speak to Sophie in private.
"I see the reason for this caprice," I say to her. "One could not have greater
delicacy nor make a more inappropriate use of it. Dear Sophie, reassure yourself. I
have given you a man. Do not fear to take him for a man. You have had the first
fruits of his youth. He has not squandered it on anyone. He will preserve it for
you for a long time.
"My dear child, I must explain to you what my intentions were in the conversation
all three of us had the day before yesterday. You perhaps perceived in my advice
only an art of managing your pleasures in order to make them durable. O Sophie, it
had another object more worthy of my efforts. In becoming your husband, Emile has
become the head of the house. It is for you to obey, just as nature wanted it.
However, when the woman resembles Sophie, it is good that the man be guided by her.
This is yet another law of nature. And it is in order to give you as much authority
over his heart as his sex gives him over your person that I have made you the
arbiter of his pleasures. It will cost you some painful privations, but you will
reign over him if you know how to reign over yourself; what has happened already
shows me that this difficult art is not beyond your courage. You will reign by
means of love for a long
[478]
BOOK V
time if you make your favors rare and precious, if you know how to make them
valued. Do you want to see your husband constantly at your feet? Then keep him
always at some distance from your person. But put modesty, and not capriciousness,
in your severity. Let him view you as reserved, not whimsical. Take care that in
managing his love you do not make him doubt your own. Make yourself cherished by
your favors and respected by your refusals. Let him honor his wife's chastity
without having to complain of her coldness.
"It is by this means, my child, that he will give you his confidence, listen to
your opinions, consult you about his business, and decide nothing without
deliberating with you about it. It is by this means that you can bring him back to
wisdom when he goes astray; lead him by a gentle persuasion; make yourself lovable
in order to make yourself useful; and use coquetry in the interests of virtue and
love to the benefit of reason.
"Nevertheless, do not believe that even this art can serve you forever. Whatever
precautions anyone may take, enjoyment wears out pleasures, and love is worn out
before all others. But when love has lasted a long time, a sweet habit fills the
void it leaves behind, and the attraction of mutual confidence succeeds the
transports of passion. Children form a relationship between those who have given
them life that is no less sweet and is often stronger than love itself. When you
stop being Emile's beloved, you will be his wife and his friend. You will be the
mother of his children. Then, in place of your former reserve, establish between
yourselves the greatest intimacy. No more separate beds, no more refusals, no more
caprices. Become his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without
you, and that as soon as he leaves you, he feels he is far from himself. You were
so good at making the charms of domestic life reign in your paternal household; now
make them reign in your own. Every man who is pleased in his home loves his wife.
Remember that if your husband lives happily at home, you will be a happy woman.
"As for the present, do not be so severe with your lover. He has merited more
obligingness. He would be offended by your fears. No longer be so careful about his
health at the expense of his happiness, and enjoy your own happiness. You must not
expect disgust, nor rebuff desire. You must refuse not for refusing's sake but to
give value to what is granted."
Then I reunite them, and I say to her young husband in her presence: "It is
necessary to bear the yoke which you have imposed on yourself. Try to merit having
it made light for you. Above all, sacrifice to the graces, and do not imagine that
you make yourself more lovable by pouting." It is not difficult to make peace
between them, and everyone can easily figure out the terms. The treaty is signed
with a kiss. Then I say to my pupil, "Dear Emile, a man needs advice and guidance
throughout his life. Up to now I have done my best to fulfill this duty toward you.
Here my long task ends, and another's begins. Today I abdicate the authority you
confided to me, and Sophie is your governor from now on."
Little by little the first delirium subsides and allows them to taste
[479]
EMILE
the charms of their new condition in peace. Happy lovers! Worthy couple! To honor
their virtues and to paint their felicity, one would have to tell the history of
their lives. How many times, as I contemplate my work in them, I feel myself seized
by a rapture that makes my heart palpitate! How many times I join their hands in
mine while blessing providence and sighing ardently! How many kisses I give to
these two hands which clasp each other! How many times have these hands felt the
tears I shed on them! The young couple share my raptures, and they too are moved.
Their respectable parents once again enjoy their youth in that of their children.
They begin, so to speak, to live again in them—or rather they come to know the
value of life for the first time. They curse their former wealth which prevented
them from tasting so charming a fate at the same age. If there is happiness on
earth, it must be sought in the abode where we live.
A few months later Emile enters my room one morning, embraces me, and says, "My
master, congratulate your child. He hopes soon to have the honor of being a father.
Oh, what efforts are going to be imposed on our zeal, and how we are going to need
you! God forbid that I let you also raise the son after having raised the father.
God forbid that so holy and so sweet a duty should ever be fulfilled by anyone but
myself, even if I were to make as good a choice for my son as was made for me. But
remain the master of the young masters. Advise us and govern us. We shall be
docile. As long as I live, I shall need you. I need you more than ever now that my
functions as a man begin. You have fulfilled yours. Guide me so that I can imitate
you. And take your rest. It is time."
End

[480]
Notes
References to Rousseau's other works which are not readily available in translation
and are not divided into small chapters will be to the French edition, Oeuvres
Completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4
vols. (Paris: Galhmard, 1959-1969, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade). It will be cited as
O.C. References to the two Discourses and the Confessions will be to both French
and English editions.
PREFACE
1. Whether there is any particular significance to the name chosen by Rousseau is
unclear. A possible source is Plutarch's Life of Aemilius Paulus. Aemilius was
descended from either the philosopher Pythagoras or the legislator Numa. He was
devoted to education, and his life was particularly characterized by contemplation
and independence of fortune, which are perhaps the central goals of Emile's
education. La Bruyere used the name Aemile, after Aemilius Paulus, for his portrait
of the Prince de Conde (Characters II. 32).
2. "We are sick with evils that can be cured; and nature, having brought us forth
sound, itself helps us if we wish to be improved." The work from which this
quotation is drawn, On Anger, is significant for Rousseau's intention. Anger is the
passion which must be overcome, and his analysis of human psychology gives it a
central place. It has pervasive and protean effects. His correction of education
consists essentially in extirpating the roots of anger.
3. For Rousseau's own presentation of the background and the intention of the
Emile, see Confessions IX, especially O.C. I, p. 409 or Confessions, 2 vols. (New
York and London: Everyman's Library, Dent, 1931; hereafter referred to as
Everyman's), II, p. 60, and Letters from the Mountain V, O.C. Ill, p. 783. For his
judgment of it cf. Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 386, 573 or Everyman's II, pp. 37, 213-
214.
4. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1690, in Locke's Educational Writings, ed.
James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). This book is of
capital importance for Rousseau's project, not only because he adopts much of it,
but especially because it represents the other great modern alternative. Rousseau
defines much of his position as over against that of Locke. A deep understanding of
Emile presupposes a knowledge of Locke's teaching.
5. See Book I, note 19.
6. These explanations are Rousseau's, who planned and commissioned the
engravings. He considered them an integral part of the text. I am grateful to the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto for providing the
photographs made from the illustrations, in a copy of the first edition in its
collection.
7. The first edition consisted of four volumes.
BOOK I
1. For a different statement about the true addressees of Emile cf. Introduction,
p. 28 and note 28.
2. Rousseau omitted the following note, which was in his manuscript, from the
first edition but apparently intended to restore it in later ones. His reasons for
doing so were evidently prudential and reflect the rhetorical problems posed by the
political and religious conditions prevailing: "Thus the wars of republics are
crueller than those of monarchies. But if the war of kings is moderate, it is their
peace which is terrible. It is better to be their enemy than their subject."
3. Livy Roman History, Summary of XVIII; Cicero Offices III 26-27; Horace Odes
III 5.
4. Plutarch Lycurgus XXV; Sayings of Spartans 231B, Sayings of Kings 191F.
5. Plutarch Agesilaus XXIX; Sayings of Spartan Women 241C.
U8l]
NOTES
6. Rousseau is the first writer to use the word bourgeois in the modern sense
popularized by Marx. It is denned in opposition to citizen, and the understanding
connected with the term is central to all later political thought. Cf. Social
Contract I 6 note. However, Rousseau does frequently use it in its more ordinary
meaning of middle-class as opposed to peasant, poor, or noble. Of course, these two
senses are closely related.
7. Rousseau bases himself particularly on Plutarch's Lycurgus.
8. Cf. Social Contract IV 8.
9. Public schools, almost exclusively under clerical supervision and with clerics
as teachers. Rousseau's first draft of the note was somewhat different; in
particular "forced to follow the established practice . . ." was originally "forced
to follow rules which they did not make . . ." This change indicates the problem
and clarifies the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. Rousseau's book
contains the new rules intended to take the place of the old ones which are the
true source of the modern corruption. The first of these new rules is that man is
naturally good.
10. Cicero Tusculan Disputations V ix 27, cf. Montaigne Essays II 2. "I have
caught you, Fortune, and blocked all your means of access, so that you could not
get near me." Metrodorus, an Epicurean, is the source of the saying, and the two
contexts cited are of interest for the theme of Emile.
11. "The midwife delivers, the nurse feeds, the pedagogue instructs, the master
teaches." A definition of Varro quoted by Nonius Marcellus De compendiosa doctrina
V 447.
12. For a discussion of the sentiment of existence, a central notion in
Rousseau's thought, see Dreams of a Solitary Walker V.
13. Histoire Naturelle by Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788) was a great
source for Rousseau's understanding of nature. It was published in forty-four
volumes between 1749 and 1804.
14. Achilles plays in Emile, as in the Republic, a great role. The frontispiece of
Book I represents Thetis plunging Achilles in the Styx, and the first education is
intended to fulfill the pedagogic intention of that symbolic act. Even the
inevitable vulnerable heel is given central significance in Rousseau's
interpretation. Cf. V.,
P- 443-
15. Plutarch Cato the Elder XX; Suetonius Augustus 64. Rousseau apparently took
these examples from Locke. Cf. Axtell, Locke's Educational Writings, p. 164, note
4.
16. Cf. Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 344-345, p. 594; Everyman's I, pp. 315-316, II,
P- 234.
17. Cf. Social Contract II 7. The comparison to the legislator is illuminating in
many ways, particularly with respect to Rousseau's own role and motivation as
thinker and writer.
18. Cf. Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 267-270; Everyman's I, pp. 245-248.
19. In traditional logic a maxim was the major premise of a practical syllogism
and hence both the beginning point of reasoning about action and the end or goal of
action. For example, "Men should seek to preserve themselves" is a maxim. Rousseau
uses the term frequently. The establishment in Emile's soul of the true maxims of
the good life is the purpose of his education. Simply, a maxim is a principle of
conduct.
20. Xenophon Education of Cyrus I ii 2-14. The passage is mentioned by Montaigne
Essays I 20.
21. Confessions is the description of the education of a genius.
22. Cf. Plato Phaedo 64A; Montaigne Essays I 20.
23. Locke, Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings,
paragraphs 29-30.
24. Antonio Celestina Cocchi, Del vitto pitagorico per uso della medicina,
Florence, 1743. Giovanni Bianchi, Se il vitto pitagorico di soli vegetabilis sia
giovevole per con-servare la sanita e per la cura d'alcune malatie, Venice, 1752.
Although much of this passage on diet is based on an antiquated nutritional
science, it is easy to recognize that the kernel of Rousseau's thesis can be
maintained and is recognizable in currently fashionable positions. Rousseau does
not commit himself to any particular set of facts or interpretations. All of this
is derivative, and he uses what fits his intention which seems to support
vegetarianism, a position further elaborated in p. 153-155 (but cf. pp. 320-321,
353, 435). However, vegetarianism is only a superficial expression of a deeper
intention, and neither Rousseau nor Emile seems in fact to be a vegetarian.
Vegetarianism is connected with a certain view of the harmoniousness of nature and
man's peaceful relation to it and the other species as opposed to the state of war.
This section belongs properly with the one preceding on medicine, in which nature
is given primacy over art. The deepest strand is indicated by this diet's being
called Pythagorean and thus connected with a particular philosophic way of life.
25. Simon de La Loubere, Du royaume de Siam, Amsterdam, 1691, I, p. 80; Claude
[482]
NOTES
Le Beau, Aventures du Sr. C. Le Beau, avocat en Parlement, Amsterdam, 1738, II, p.
66.
26. Homer Iliad VI 466-475. The whole context should be examined.
27. Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) was a Dutch professor of medicine among whose
works is a Treatise on Children's Diseases which Rousseau studied in preparation
for writing Emile. Rousseau, however, quickly gives a moral explanation of the
phenomenon he is describing, and Boerhaave is used only to give physiological
support. This is characteristic of his procedure in all the passages which appear
merely technical.
28. For the Abbe de St. Pierre and Rousseau's relation to him see Confessions IX,
O.C. I, pp. 407-408; Everyman's II, pp. 57-58. Rousseau edited and published some
of his works. The opinion here cited is not to be found in the works edited by
Rousseau but is repeated in the passage in Confessions referred to above. Cf. pp.
466-467 below and note 69.
29. De Cive, Preface. The context should be examined.
30. Pp. 257-313 below.
31. The French word is fantaisie. It is closely allied to imagination, a most
important word for Emile. It will always be translated by whim. Cf. p. 48.
32. Cf. Plato Laws VII 791E-792D.
33. Replacing the letter r with a guttural trill.
34. "He lives and is unconscious of his own life." Ovid in the previous sentence
says that, struck by his banishment, he was "no less stupid than a man struck by
Jove's thunderbolts."
BOOK II
1. Valerius Maximus Memorable Sayings and Deeds I vi 5. The French enfant means
both infant and child.
2. The success of medicine, particularly in the last forty years and with respect
to infant mortality, is the change since Rousseau wrote which would seem most to
undermine his arguments. (Cf. p. 362, note.) But it should be observed that he uses
this statistic to support a point which could be argued without it. Here Rousseau
makes use of the high death rate among children to lend rhetorical support to the
deeper argument against the teleologies of the afterlife and of adulthood. That
argument in turn goes to the heart of his teaching concerning the tension between
nature and society and the connection of the aforementioned teleologies with
society.
3. Quoted in Aulus Gellius Attic Nights IX 8: "It is not possible for the man who
needs fifteen thousand coats to need less than that number; thus when I need more
than I have, I subtract from what I have and am content with what I have."
4. Rousseau added the following note for the later edition: "It is understood
that I speak here of men who reflect, and not of all men."
5. Cf. p. 442 below.
6. Plutarch Themistocles XVIII 5.
7. I, note 31 above.
8. For the state of nature, cf. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in R.
Masters, ed., The Discourses (New York: St. Martin's 1964), or O.C. III. Of all
Rousseau's works it is probably the one that is most important for Emile.
9. This is the second title of the Social Contract. See note 10 below.
10. For the general and particular wills, cf. Social Contract I 6-8.
11. Cf. pp. 67-68 above.
12. Leviathan XIV; de Cive X.
13. Herodotus Histories VII 35; Plutarch On the Control of Anger 455D-E. Cf.
Homer Iliad XXI 130-132, 212-226, 322ff.; Plato Republic III 391A-B.
14. Roussseau implies that monarchy is the political version of perverse infancy.
Hobbes in de Cive X, just referred to by Rousseau (cf. note 12 above), defends
monarchy in spite of the possibility of infant rulers. This point in the education
is a fundamental response to Hobbes' political thought.
15. Locke, Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, end of
paragraph 80, and paragraph 81.
16. In the original sense of learned men.
17. This is the first discussion of amour-propre in Emile. It is the central term
in
[483]
NOTES
Rousseau's psychology and will remain untranslated throughout. Ordinarily, in its
non-"extended sense," it would be translated by vanity or pride, but it is a word
too full of nuance and too important for Emile not to be denned contextually and
revealed in its full subtlety. It is usually opposed to amour de soi. Both
expressions mean self-love. Rousseau, instead of opposing love of self to love of
others, opposes two kinds of self-love, a good and bad form. Thus without
abandoning the view of modern political philosophy that man is primarily concerned
with himself—particularly his own preservation—he is enabled to avoid Hobbes'
conclusion that men, as a result of their selfishness, are necessarily in
competition with one another. His earliest statement on this issue—the foundation
of his argument that man is naturally good—is Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality, note XV: "Amour-propre and amour de soi, two passions very different in
their nature and their effects, must not be confused. Love of oneself is a natural
sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which
directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue.
Amour-propre is only a relative sentiment, artificial, and born in society, which
inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else,
inspires in all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor."
In this passage of Emile Rousseau is emphasizing the original unity of self-love
which is lost in relations with other men.
18. It should be remembered that paradox means apparent contradiction, or
contradiction of common opinion, not self-contradiction. Rousseau, who is reputed
as the philosopher of paradox, actually only follows Socrates in this. Cf. Plato
Republic V.
19. The pervasiveness of the theme of anger should cause one to think back on the
book from which Rousseau drew the epigraph for Emile, Seneca's On Anger. Cf.
Plutarch On the Control of Anger 455E-456F.
20. This reproduces the teaching of modern natural right as first formulated by
Hobbes (Leviathan XIV). Rights precede duties, the latter are derivative from the
former, and the primary natural right is to seek the means of preservation.
21. This is simply Locke's account of the origin of property (Second Treatise on
Civil Government V, paragraphs 25-27).
22. This is the language of criminal investigation.
23. An old tennis term "for the odds which one player gives the other in allowing
him to score one point once during the 'set' at any time he may elect" (Oxford
English Dictionary, s. v. "bisque").
24. Locke, Some Thoughts in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, paragraph
no.
25. Diderot, Preface to Fils Naturel. Rousseau had just withdrawn to a solitary
existence and took the phrase to be directed against him. Cf. Confessions, O.C. I,
pp. 455-456; Everyman's II, p. 102; Dialogues II O.C. I, pp. 788-789; Plato
Republic I 332A-B, 335B-E.
26. Pierre Bayle, Pensees diverses sur la comete XVIII.
27. The residue after liquors have been distilled from fruit. The child's mind is
compared to a still, and the tutor to a distiller.
28. Plutarch Cato the Younger I—HI.
29. Condillac, Rousseau's contemporary, whose works, particularly Essai sur
Vorigine des connaissances humaines and Traite des sensations, are important
sources for Emile. He is derivative from the tradition which has its source in
Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. This very passage and the ones immediately
following are within the domain of his researches.
30. This refers to Plato Laws VII, which is altogether the most capital part of
the Laws for Emile, and after the Republic as a whole, the most important Platonic
source for it. For this particular reference see 793E, where play is linked with
punishment by Plato, and 796E-805C. At 803D-E the Athenian stranger says: "We must
go through life playing certain games—sacrificing, singing and dancing." The
stranger treats sacrifice as a form of play. Rousseau characteristically drops the
religious context. Cf. Book I, note 32; Montaigne Essays I xxvi, where the same
passage is referred to.
31. Seneca Letters to Lucilius LXXXVIII ig; Cf. Montaigne Essays II 21. This
letter is about liberal education and was obviously carefully read by Rousseau.
32. Plutarch Alexander XIX.
33. Montaigne (Essays I 24) regards Alexander's act as a sign of firmness.
34. This modern heir of Aesop, in the Preface to his Fables, compares himself to
Socrates who put Aesop's tales into verse at the end of his life. Rousseau's
rejection of La Fontaine's tales is also the rejection of Socrates' argument about
the teaching of tales to children (Republic II—III).
35. A synonym for fable. La Fontaine says in his Preface, as does Littre's
dictionary, that the parables of Jesus are species of the genus apologue. He
suggests that all apologues are god-sent. Thus Rousseau's rejection of fables aims
beyond La Fontaine or even Socrates.
[484]
NOTES
36. Cf. Plato Republic II 378D-E. Rousseau draws a more extreme conclusion from
Socrates' observation.
37. Here Rousseau uses La Fontaine's own language in his Preface against him.
Locke uses the same expression in rejecting teaching the Bible to children,
although he favors reading Aesop's Fables (Some Thoughts in Axtell, ed., Locke's
Educational Writings, paragraph 158).
38. It is actually second, as Rousseau intended to mention in future editions.
The first is the Cicada and the Ant. Rousseau in his manuscript, at the end of the
previous paragraph, first wrote, "I am not afraid to attack La Fontaine in his
strength," and "I shall begin with the best, as is my method." Similarly, in Letter
to a"Alembert he criticizes Moliere's masterpiece The Misanthrope. The serious
critic chooses only the greatest opponents and only their greatest works.
39. Master, joined to a name, usually applies to someone possessing a skill, to a
master workman. It is also a title of lawyers.
40. Prior to the French Revolution Monsieur was a form of address reserved for
members of certain classes of society.
41. This would mean that he is of noble family.
42. La Fontaine wrote pretty.
43. Cf. note 38 above. It is actually the first. The cicada comes in the winter
to ask the ant for food. The ant asks what he did all summer. The cicada replies,
"I sang," to which the ant says: "Now you can dance."
44. In the first instance Rousseau refers especially to Fables I vi, The Heifer,
the Nanny-goat and the Ewe in Society with the Lion. The lion divides up a stag in
four parts and lays claim to all four, the first because he is called lion, the
second by right of the stronger, the third because he is the most valiant, the
fourth because he will strangle any of the others who touch it. The second is II
ix, The Lion and the Gnat, in which a gnat, at whom the lion cannot get, defeats
the lion with his stings—only to be eaten by a spider.
45. Fables I v, The Wolf and the Dog. A hungry wolf who is offered luxury by a
dog turns down the offer when he sees that the dog's neck is rubbed bare by his
collar. The wolf prefers freedom if the price of luxury is chains.
46. La Fontaine also wrote a collection of tales of a licentious character,
partially inspired by Boccaccio. This sentence is Voltaire's, who intended it as
praise.
47. Locke's discussion of learning how to read (Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed.,
Locke's Educational Writings, paragraph 148—155) is altogether a good point from
which to see the confrontation between Locke and Rousseau on education. The
description of the dice is contained in that passage. The desks of the previous
sentence were elaborate devices like printer's tables, with pigeonholes containing
cards instead of print. The cards had letters, syllables, and sounds written out on
them; the child stood before the desk and, using the cards, laid out words and
sentences.
48. "Above all it is proper to watch out that he not hate studies which he is not
yet able to love and, the bitterness once perceived, still shun them after the
ignorant years are past."
49. There is no other source in Rousseau's writings for this story as true
history, but it can be related to Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 292-293; Everyman's I,
p. 266. Mme. Dupin's son was much older than the child of whom Rousseau speaks
here.
50. By Moliere. Sbrigani (a name meaning rascal) is akin to the fox who plays on
the vanity of the crow in the fable. He sets up a comedy within the comedy, as does
Rousseau here to accomplish his ends.
51. "There is no root here."
52. Montaigne Essays I 26; Locke, Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's
Educational Writings, paragraphs 205-206. The other three were authors of treatises
on education at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth
centuries. Rousseau's opinion of each is expressed in the adjective he attaches to
his name. None is very significant for Rousseau's thought.
53. Modeled after the uniforms of Hussars (light cavalry troops); a narrow jacket
with a row of buttons on the left side fastened with braided loops running across
the chest; pants large in the thighs, but tight around the calves and the ankles.
54. "In open air."
55. Politics and the Arts, Letter to M. d'Alembert, ed. A. Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1968), p. 101. Herodotus Histories III 12. Chardin, a Frenchman
who settled in England and died there in 1713 as Sir John Chardin, was the author
of The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies etc., which was
a great source of information for eighteenth-century thinkers. Rousseau refers to
vol. II, p. 51.
56. This remark is fraught with political meaning. Cf. p. 52 above. Rousseau,
following Montesquieu, holds that "liberty is not the fruit of all climates"
(Social Contract III 8) and that Europe is the natural seat of liberty and Asia
that of despotism.
[485]
NOTES
57. Locke, Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings,
paragraphs 5-7 • There he cites "the Scythian philosopher who gave a very
significant answer to the Athenian who wondered how he could go naked in frost and
snow. 'How,' said the Scythian, 'can you endure your face exposed to the sharp
winter air?' 'My face is used to it,' said the Athenian. 'Think me all face,'
replied the Scythian."
58. Montaigne Essays I 20.
59. Montaigne Essays II 21.
60. Inoculation was new and still controversial. There was strong opposition to
it on religious grounds in France. Voltaire had championed it (Lettres philoso-
phiques XI). Rousseau, who clearly has no doubts about its effectiveness, finds
himself equally distant from both its enlightened proponents and its pious
opponents, and the nuanced presentation of this issue indicates the difficulty as
well as the importance of his alternative view of it.
61. Locke, Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, paragraph
138. The context in Locke is helpful for understanding Rousseau's intention here.
62. An important use of this important word for Rousseau. It is almost equivalent
to the Greek demos. The people is opposed either to the noble or the educated.
63. "Passion is not caused by habitual things."
64. This period in Rousseau's life is described in Confessions I, O.C. I, pp. 12-
24; Everyman's I, pp. 8-16.
65. I Samuel 26; Iliad X 465-525.
66. In 1602 the Duke of Savoy attacked Geneva—using ladders to scale the walls,
hence the attack was later called the Escalade—with the intention of reimposing
Catholicism on Calvin's city. The citizens of Geneva won a great victory which has
been celebrated ever since.
67. Plato Republic X 596E-598B.
68. Considered the greatest painter of antiquity. He worked particularly at the
court of Alexander the Great and made famous paintings of him.
69. This note did not appear in the first edition and was intended for the later
edition. The boy was Mozart, who played in Paris in 1763.
70. The use of letters for the fixed notes and of sol-fa syllables for the
relative degrees of the scale is in fact the practice of the English, Italian, and
German nations. The French still use the method criticized by Rousseau despite the
disadvantages he points out.
Rousseau was an accomplished musician, a composer of some fame, the inventor of a
system of musical notation, and a controversialist in the quarrel between French
and Italian music. He earned a living as a musical copyist. Among his works are an
extensive musical dictionary and many essays on music.
71. Arcadia I 5-6. Pelasgus taught men to eat acorns. His son Lycaon (II 3-4)
used human sacrifice.
72. "Born to consume the produce of the earth." Horace Epistles I ii 27.
73. The Banians are Brahman merchants in India; the Gaures are the same as the
Guebres or Parsees, adherents of the Zoroastrian religion.
74. This is an error, although butchers could not be jurors. Rousseau wrote a
note to this effect to be added to the later edition.
75. Homer Odyssey IX 82-566.
76. Homer Odyssey XII 395-396. This is an adaptation by Rousseau, who took it
seriously enough to look at the Greek original, which he copied in the margin of
the manuscript. The translation of the first two lines is almost literal, and a
literal translation of the last two would read, "both roasted and raw, and there
was a voice as of kine." These were, according to Homer, god-sent portents of doom
for eating the kine of Helios, forbidden flesh, and they occur prior to the eating.
Plutarch immediately after the quote—where Rousseau says, "This is what he must
have imagined and felt"—says, "This is a fabrication and a myth, but the meal is
truly portentous."
77. The passage is from Plutarch On the Eating of Flesh 993B-995B, liberally
adapted with many omissions and additions.
78. Herodotus Histories I 94.
79. In French it meant "born in," "coming from a certain place" as opposed to
"given by nature." In English, of course, it has both senses.
80. Plutarch Alexander VI-VIII. According to Plutarch, Alexander tamed Bucephalus
before Aristotle became his teacher.
BOOK III
1. Emile learns Ptolemaic astronomy because it is the observation of common
sense. Copernican astronomy will follow when he himself makes the observations
which lead to it.
2. "A skeleton celestial globe or sphere, consisting merely of metal rings or
hoops
[486]
NOTES
representing the equator, ecliptic, tropics, arctic and antarctic circles, and
colures, revolving on an axis within a wooden horizon" (Oxford English Dictionary,
s. v. "armillary"). Rousseau evidently had used ones made of cardboard, not metal.
3. ". . . two great circles which intersect each other at right angles at the
poles, and divide the equinoctial and the ecliptic into four equal parts. One
passes through the equinoctial points, the other through the solstitial points of
the ecliptic" (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. "colures").
4. The distinction between the analytic and synthetic ("resolutive" and
"compositive") methods, found in Galileo and Hobbes, was given its best-known
formulation by Descartes (Meditations, Second Responses, final four pages). It is
closely related to the distinction between induction and deduction familiar to more
recent discussion of scientific method, although Rousseau avoids using these latter
terms.
According to Aristotle (Nic. Ethics 1095a 3iff), it was Plato who taught us to
distinguish between beginning with what is first to us and ascending
("analytically") to first principles, and beginning with first principles and
descending ("synthetically"). This difference is mirrored in Descartes' distinction
between beginning with parts (or what is "better known to us"—e.g. the ego
cogitans) and beginning with wholes. Here it is found in the movement from the
child's home to the cosmic system (analysis), and the movement from the cosmic
system to the child's home (synthesis).
Descartes argues for the superiority of the analytic method on both pedagogic and
philosophic grounds. For him it is the way of instruction and the way of discovery
(although Rousseau here identifies synthesis with the method of instruction), and
therefore only it contents the philosophic student. The synthetic ("Euclidean,"
syllogistic) procedure, on the other hand, is best able to convince or silence the
inattentive or hostile student. Yet a simple disjunction between the analytic and
synthetic mode is untenable. Beginning with the part, or what is first or most
knowable to us, is impossible without some concept of the whole, at least the whole
of human knowledge accessible to us. And this is evident from the actual
philosophic procedures of a Descartes or a Plato, or from the empiricism of Locke
and Condillac known to Rousseau.
He therefore judiciously mixes the modes without making explicit to his pupil his
varying procedure. The child who was taught solid geometry by cakes would be a good
example of this. In the end his systematic knowledge of the science would indicate
that a certain solid would contain more cake, and his experience, or his stomach,
would confirm this fact. And the experience would lead to the discovery of the
principle. These are the reciprocal proofs of which Rousseau speaks. He tries to
combine the philosopher's method with the child's of p. 172 below. The combination
of the two methods, and their meeting point, is further used in the discovery of
the compass immediately following and in Emile's discovery of the use of astronomy
for getting his lunch. Finally, the entire education is a model of this union: the
production of a man who can move by sound reasoning from his experience and needs
to their place in the whole, and who, knowing the whole, finds his place within it,
like the insect in his web, (cf. p. 80-81 above).
In this Rousseau differs from the new science's single-minded concentration on
discovery and returns to reflection on the "bottomless sea" of which he speaks on
this page. (I am grateful to Richard Kennington for his help with this note.)
5. A meridian here is simply a north-south line. In the northern hemisphere, the
sun is due south at high noon, so that a shadow cast by a stake points due north.
Shadows of equal length are cast by a stake in the morning and evening at times
equally distant from noon; and the north-south line (as also the shadow at noon)
bisects the angle formed by any such pair of shadows. There are several ways of
obtaining this bisector; what Rousseau has in mind here is the construction of a
rhombus where one morning shadow and two evening shadows of the same length as the
first form the sides. The fourth side can be easily supplied. The diagonal at right
angles to the course of the sun is the meridian.
6. Rousseau added a note for the next edition in response to a man who had
written an Anti-Emile. "I could not keep from laughing in reading a subtle critique
of this little tale by M. de Formey. 'This magician,' he says, 'who prides himself
on his emulation with a child and gravely sermonizes his teacher is an individual
of the world of Emiles.' The clever M. de Formey was unable to suppose that this
little scene was arranged and that the magician had been instructed about the role
he had to play; for, indeed, I did not say so. But on the other hand, how many
times have I declared that I did not write for people who have to be told
everything?"
7. Cf. p. in.
8. Cf. Plato Phaedrus 274C-275D. The god Theuth there mentioned was identified
with Hermes.
9. In the manuscript Rousseau had originally continued, "for although this state
is not that of social man, it is by it that he ought in truth to evaluate all the
objects of his esteem."
[487]
NOTES
10. "I want only those good things which are envied by the people." Petronius
Satyricon ioo. The context concerns love. ii. The identity of this person is
unknown.
12. Parisian jewelers.
13. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, as Rousseau himself indicated in a
later note. Cf. particularly, O.C. Ill, p. 164, 173-178; R. Masters, ed., The
Discourses, pp. 141-142, 154-160. See also Discourse on Political Economy and Plato
Republic 369B-373E.
14. These two examples are drawn from Plutarch's lives of Timoleon and Aemilius
Paulus, a parallel pair. Dionysius the younger, Plato's pupil, is described in
Timoleon 14-16. Aemilius Paulus, whose namesake Emile possibly is (see Preface,
note 1 above), conquered Perseus, king of Macedon, and his son ended as Rousseau
says (Aemilius Paulus 37). The entire context beginning with 27 should be
considered as well as the comparison between Timoleon and Aemilius. Plutarch judges
that Aemilius is the more perfect because he was unbroken by bad fortune in the
loss of his children.
15. This obscure Vonones was, on the request of the Parthian people, installed as
king by Augustus around 8 a.d. They soon rejected him. His story is to be found in
Tacitus Annals II 1-4, 58, 68. I do not find a source for his father's being called
a "king of kings." The manuscript indicates that Rousseau intended to mention the
Stuart pretender living in France, but he decided against it, evidently on
prudential grounds.
16. Cf. Dreams of a Solitary Walker VI, end, where Rousseau speaks of himself as
a useless member of society.
17. Swiss were frequently used in France in domestic service and became
synonymous with it.
18. Locke too believed that a trade should be learned, but the spirit of his
instruction is very different as is the style of his presentation. Some Thoughts,
in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, paragraphs 201-210.
19. The Abbe de Saint Pierre, cf. I, note 28 above.
20. "Few women wrestle, few eat the athlete's food; you spin wool, and when the
work is finished, you carry it in baskets."
21. The trade of Spinoza, whose example might well be contemplated for this whole
segment.
22. The Ottoman court at Constantinople.
23. Rousseau combines the stories of Midas' golden touch and his ass's ears,
given him by Apollo when Midas, as judge, chose Marsyas over Apollo in their
musical contest.
24. A dupe in the famous French farce, Maitre Patelin. This is another Crow and
Fox story. M. Guillaume is a cloth manufacturer who is done out of some cloth by
Patelin. According to L. J. Courtois (Annales J. J. Rousseau, vol. XXII, 242-243),
Rousseau is referring to a version of the story by the Abbe D. A. de Brueys,
L'Avocat Patelin, in which Patelin, flattering Guillaume, says, "M. Guillaume, I
bet you thought up that color." To which the latter responds, "Oh yes, I and my
dyer."
25. The political power of the guilds at Zurich was such that it was difficult to
become a member of the city council without being a master craftsman from one of
them. Rousseau indicates that the system had been corrupted and that the status of
master now came from holding the office rather than practicing the art.
26. In a note for the next edition Rousseau wrote: "I have since found the
opposite by a more exact experiment. Refraction acts circularly, and the end of the
stick in the water appears larger than the other end. But that changes nothing of
the force of the reasoning, and the conclusion is no less exact."
27. Compare Plato Republic X 602B-E for the same example. The liberation from the
illusion is the intention of both authors but the means are radically different.
Rousseau believed that the senses could correct the senses and hence that Platonic
transcendence can be avoided along with the illusion of the senses. He indicated in
a first draft of this passage that he followed, although improved upon, the
Epicureans in their respect for the senses.
28. Montaigne Essays II 27.
BOOK IV
1. Homer Odyssey X 19-75.
2. The following lines were written in the earliest draft of Emile and then
crossed out: "If I am asked how it is possible for the morality of human life to
emerge from a purely physical revolution, I will answer that I do not know. I base
myself throughout on experience and do not seek the reasons for the facts. I do not
know what connection there may be between the seminal spirits and the soul's
affects,
[488]
NOTES
between sexual development and the sentiment of good and evil. I see that these
connections exist. I reason not to explain them but to draw out their
consequences."
3. In both the manuscript and in the corrections for a future edition Rousseau
wrote, "if there are any."
4. In an early draft Rousseau had written, and then crossed out, in the place of
the preceding sentence the following one: "One takes an interest in him, one helps
him in his misfortunes because one hopes that they will end and then one will be
recompensed."
5. "Not ignorant of ills, I learn to assist the needy." Virgil Aeneid I 630.
6. Rousseau probably refers to the Thousand and One Nights.
7. This passage is an important commentary on the apparent Stoicism to be found
elsewhere in Emile, particularly at the beginning of Book II.
8. The French word translated by face is physionomie, and Rousseau here tries to
give a serious explanation of the phenomena treated by the pseudoscience of
physiognomy.
9. The public square in Paris where executions took place and where men out of
work gathered.
10. Military recruiters tricked men by giving them money which was later alleged
to be a bonus for enlistment. Cf. Voltaire Candide II.
11. Cf. Plato Republic I 338D-339A. The investigation proposed here by Rousseau
is identical to that undertaken in the Republic.
12. Cicero Tusculan Disputations V 3; Montaigne Essays I 26.
13. Historical novels by La Calprenede.
14. Montaigne Essays II 10. Montaigne wrote "what comes from within" and not
takes place.
15. Charles Duclos, who wrote a history of Louis XI, Considerations sur les
moeurs de ce siecle and Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire du XVIIIe siecle, was one
of Rousseau's earliest literary friends and one of the last with whom he broke.
16. Plutarch Fabius Maximus XV.
17. Plutarch Agesilaus XXV.
18. Plutarch Caesar XL
19. Cf. pp. 110-111 and note 32 above.
20. Plutarch Aristides VII.
21. Plutarch Philopoeman II.
22. Andrew Ramsey (1686-1743), a Scotsman, became French in the service of the
Stuart pretenders to the British throne; he was a disciple of Fenelon. He wrote a
biography of Turenne.
23. Turenne was the second son of the Due de Bouillon, sovereign prince of Sedan.
The son of his older brother succeeded to the dukedom.
24. Plutarch Pyrrhus XIV.
25. Ibid. XXXIV.
26. Suetonius Augustus XXIII.
27. Ibid. LXV; Tacitus Annals I 3-6.
28. Plutarch Gaius Marius XXIII.
29. "The Venetian character in Italian comedy represented as a lean and foolish
old man, wearing spectacles, pantaloons, and slippers. Hence in modern harlequinade
or pantomime, a character represented as a foolish and vicious old man, the butt of
the clown's [harlequin's] jokes, and his abettor in his pranks and tricks" (Oxford
English Dictionary, s. v. "pantaloon").
30. Fables I iii:
The world is full of people who are no wiser; Every bourgeois wants to build like
great lords; Every little prince has ambassadors; Every marquis wants to have
pages.
31. In a slightly different formulation of this paragraph in the earlier
manuscripts, the preceding sentence is replaced by the following revealing one:
"All this is to his advantage in any event, for you must consider that I am making
him beneficent here not for the advantage of others but for his own instruction."
32. Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, paragraphs 190-
192; cf. paragraphs 136-139; and pp. 134-137 above.
33. Genesis 31:19, 32-
34. The Algonquin Indians.
35. In the earliest draft of Emile Rousseau formulates this tentative assertion
of the existence of two substances even more tentatively. He leaves the
irreducibility of spirit to matter as a question. O.C. IV, pp. 218-219.
36. Plutarch Dialogue on Love 756B.
37. Plutarch On Superstition 169F-170A; Bayle Pensees diverses sur la comete CXV.
38. Horace Odes II i 7-8. "I walk on fires covered by deceitful cinders." Horace
wrote you. The context is a lament for the destruction of the republic, the
bloodshed
[489]
NOTES
of the civil wars, and the establishment of universal tyranny. The "you" refers to
Asinius Pollion, who wrote a history of the civil wars and who, according to
Horace, defended accused men. This is the role Rousseau adopts.
39. Vitam impendere vero, "Dedicate life to truth," Juvenal Satires IV 91.
Rousseau uses this quote as the epigraph of Letters from the Mountain. His typical
use of it can be seen in Letter to d'Alembert (A. Bloom, ed. and trans. [Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968]), p. 132. He discusses the problem of living
according to this motto in Dreams of a Solitary Walker IV. The original context of
the quote should be considered.
40. The autobiographical elements of the following section can be compared to
Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 60-70, 90-92, 118-119; Everyman's I, pp. 52-61, 80-83,
106-107.
41. In the earlier manuscripts Rousseau wrote ". . . in order to set aside low
thoughts in our souls and lift us up to sublime contemplations."
42. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), English theologian, admirer of the teachings of
Descartes, friend of Newton, and famous for his correspondence with Leibniz,
published a work called A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the
Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian
Revelation, in opposition to Hobbes, Spinoza, the author of the Oracles of Reason,
and other Deniers of Natural and Revealed Religion.
43. Charles-Marie de la Condamine, Relation abrege d'un voyage fait dans Vin-
terieur de I'Amerique meridiondle, Paris 1745, pp. 66-67.
44. Descartes Principles of Philosophy III 43-47. 45- I.e., centrifugal.
46. Amatus Lusitanus and Paracelsus were famous doctors of the sixteenth century.
47. Bernard Nieuwentyt, a Dutch doctor (1654-1718), wrote a book entitled The
Existence of God Demonstrated by the Wonders of Nature.
48. Essay on Human Understanding IV 3-6.
49. Plutarch Epicurus actualy makes a pleasant life impossible 1105C.
50. The third line is not in the psalm, and there is nothing in it as a whole
which has to do with afterlife. Rather it relates entirely to God's role on earth
and to living men.
51. Condillac Traite des animaux II 5. However cf. p. 62 above and Discourse on
the Origins of Inequality, O.C. Ill, p. 135; R. Masters, ed., The Discourses, pp.
105-106.
52. For example, in Essays I 23.
53- The word is fantaisie, which has elsewhere been translated by whim.
54. Pierre Charron (1541-1603), a friend of Montaigne and strongly influenced by
the Essays. His motto was the "I don't know" adopted by Jean-Jaques and Emile (p.
206). A theologal is a canon attached to a diocesan cathedral whose function is to
teach theology.
55. Plutarch On Stoic Self-contradictions, 1034E-F.
56. Exposition de la doctrine de I'Eglise Catholique sur les matieres de
controverse.
57. Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), German, Greek, and Hebrew scholar. He tried to
preserve almost all the books of the Jews and vigorously defended himself against
his antagonists who thought the Jews would be converted if they no longer had their
books. He proposed that there be two chairs of Hebrew at every German university.
Jewish worship was licensed by Papal and Imperial law at the time, and ultimately
the books were not burned. Reuchlin was in continual controversy around the issue
for seven years (1510-1517) and was charged before the Inquisition.
58. Republic II 361B-362A.
59. He was a real person, a minister of the king of Sardinia. Cf. Confessions,
O.C. I, p. 90; Everyman's I, p. 80.
60. Bayle, Pensees sur la comete CXIV, CXXXIII. and CLXII. Cf. p. 259 and note 37
above.
61. Cf. Leviticus 25.
62. Cf. II, note 55 above. Where Rousseau writes "etc." at the end of the
previous paragraph, Chardin wrote that the bridge ". . . narrower than a stretched
hair and sharper than a razor's edge, is impossible to walk on without being
supported by God's all-powerful hand. The unbelievers and the wicked will stumble
at the first step and fall into the Gehenne of the eternal fire. But for the
believers God will steady their feet on this narrow path. By God's mercy they will
pass over this bridge more quickly than a bird cleaves the air and will enter
eternal Paradise."
Rousseau leaves out the direct intervention of God and the emphasis on belief or
faith and concentrates on justice among human beings.
63. The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar had fatal consequences for
Rousseau. It was condemned by the Catholics in France and the Protestants in
Geneva. He thereby fell afoul of the authorities and became that outcast so
familiar from Confessions and Dreams of a Solitary Walker. He
explicitly elaborated
[490]
NOTES
the discussion of religion in his Lettre a Beaumont and Lettres ecrites de la
Montaigne, although the theme pervades all his works. The theological-political
situation was such that he, no more than Charron (cf. p. 296 above), could say
directly all he thought on the question, and his own views can only be elaborated
on the basis of all his works. The teaching of the Vicar should be compared to
Rousseau's statement on civil religion, Social Contract IV 8.
64. Essays II 2.
65. Genesis 26:32-33; 16:14; 18:1; 21:46-48.
66. Bucentaur was the name of the state galley. Every year—from the eleventh
through the eighteenth centuries—on Ascension Day the Doge was wed to the Adriatic
on its deck.
67. Herodotus Histories V 92. Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus in the seventh
century b.c, received an ambassador sent by Periander of Corinth who asked for
general advice. Thrasybulus replied nothing but silently walked through the
cornfields cutting off the tops of the highest stalks. This was taken by Periander
to mean that he must do away with all outstanding men in his city. Essentially the
same story is told by Livy (Roman History I 54) with Lucius Tarquinius Superbus,
the last of the kings, taking the place of Thrasybulus and his son Sextus that of
Periander. In Livy it is poppies which are leveled.
68. Plutarch Alexander 39. Alexander thus commanded Hephaestion not to reveal
what he had read in a letter to Alexander from his mother.
69. Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers VI 39. Zeno in his paradoxes
denied the existence of motion. Diogenes' refutation, which Dr. Johnson imitated in
his refutation of Berkeley (although Johnson had the bad taste to enunciate his
conclusion), was not performed in the presence of Zeno but of some unnamed man who
made the assertion. Diogenes Laertius does not mention Zeno who lived more than a
century before Diogenes.
70. Herodotus Histories IV 132. As interpreted by Gobryas (Darius at first
interpreted it otherwise) the message was, "Unless you Persians become birds and
fly up in the sky, or mice and hide yourselves in the earth, or frogs and leap into
the lakes, you will never return home again, having been struck by these arrows."
71. "Toga: the outer garment of a citizen. Sagum: the military cloak. Praetext:
the youth's first outer clothing, worn until he assumed the man's toga. Bulla: a
golden amulet worn by patrician youths until they assumed the man's toga. Lati-
clave: a badge consisting of two broad purple stripes on the edge of the tunic,
worn by senators and other persons of high rank" (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v.
"toga," "sagum," "praetext," "bulla," and "laticlave").
72. Plutarch Antony XIV.
73. The French honnete has been uniformly translated as decent. Here the word
translated seemliness is decence which has in this context to do with the kind of
conduct dictated by social propriety, particularly in relation to women, and the
world of gallantry. It is the refinement of the surface, the knowledge of the
exquisite rules of the game. Rousseau, in an earlier manuscript, added after
seemliness, "invented by the false delicacy of vice."
74. Aurelius Victor De viribus illustribus Romae 86.
75. "Nothing is difficult for him who wills."
76. Homer Odyssey XII 39-55, 192-200.
77. In the corrections for the later edition Rousseau strengthens his advice with
the phrase: "he must go to bed only when ready to drop and get out of it the moment
he wakes up." Cf. Confessions, O.C. I, pp. 16-17, 108-109; Everyman's I, pp. 11-13,
96-98.
78. Montaigne Essays I 26.
79. For Marcel cf. p. 139 above. Marcel takes the Englishman for a German noble
from one of the states ruled by an elector. The book where Rousseau read the story
is De I'Esprit (II 1) by Helvetius. It was the commonplace source of much of the
philosophic thought criticized by the Savoyard Vicar.
80. Cf. p. 39 and n. 6 above and Social Contract I 6. Rousseau, out of republican
pride, eschewed all titles of honor, civil or academic, and signed himself Citizen
of Geneva. Paimboeuf is a town on the Loire.
81. For the later edition, Rousseau changed the title to Essay on the Origin of
Languages. In that work he deals with this subject in chapters XIII-XIX.
82. "Stop, passerby, you are trampling on a hero." This was the epitaph of
Francois de Mercy, defeated at the battle of Nordlingen in 1645 by Conde (with whom
Emile's name may have some connection, cf. Preface, note 1). Cf. Voltaire The Age
of Louis XIV III.
83. Strabo Geography XIV v 9.
84. Xenophon Anabasis II vi 30. "No one ever laughed at them as cowards in war or
blamed them in friendship" is the exact text.
85. Herodotus Histories VII 228. "Passerby, tell the Lacedaemonians that here we
lie obedient to their word" is the exact text.
[491!
NOTES
86. This is the first sentence of Fontenelle's Digression sur les Anciens et les
Modernes (1686). La Motte and Terrasson, in Discours sur Homere and Dissertation
Critique sur I'lliade d'Homere (1715) respectively, had joined in asserting the
superiority of modern poetry over ancient. This was a minor skirmish in the "Battle
of the Books," the "Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns," a now forgotten
struggle which pitted the totality of ancient philosophy, science, art, literature,
politics, and morals against their modern counterparts. No issue is more important
in the history of thought, and Rousseau emphatically takes the side of the ancients
here, at least so far as literature and morals are concerned. No study of Rousseau
can be serious which does not take seriously "The Quarrel."
87. Athenaeus Banquet of the Sophists I 12.
88. "Where there is something good, there is my fatherland."
89. Plutarch Sayings of Kings 178A-B.
90. Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers VIII 63; Montaigne Essays II 1.
91. "Name given to the taverns or roadhouses in the vicinity of Paris and other
cities where the people go to drink and enjoy themselves on holidays" (translation
of the Littre dictionary definition s. v. "guingette"). The gardens and the arcades
of the Palais-Royal in Paris were the meeting-place of fashionable and corrupt
Paris society. Cf. p. 141 above.
92. The remark is attributed to Aristippus by Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus.
Lai's was a celebrated courtesan of the fourth century b.c who associated with the
likes of Diogenes and Demosthenes as well as Aristippus. She is rumored to have
been Alcibiades' daughter and she is mentioned in an epigram attributed to Plato.
Cf. Diogenes Laertius II 75; Athenaeus XII 544, 535, XIII 588. Plato Epigr. Diehl
15. Rousseau mentions her again on p. 391 below.
93. "Golden mean." Horace Odes II x 5.
94. "Who can find a strong woman? She is far; brought from the ends of the earth,
she is precious." This proverb introduces the last section of Proverbs which is
devoted to the good wife.
BOOK V
1. Cf. Genesis 2:18.
2. Some Thoughts, in Axtell, ed., Locke's Educational Writings, paragraph 215.
3. Julia, who would only commit adultery when pregnant so that her infidelities
would remain undiscovered. Brantome, La Vie des dames galantes (Paris: Gamier,
i960), p. 105.
4. Deuteronomy 22:23-27.
5. Thespitius, king of Athens, contrived for Hercules to sleep with his fifty
daughters in order that they have children by such a great hero. According to one
version, he did so in one night (sparing one who was a priestess); or, according to
another version, he took fifty nights (Diodorus Siculus Biblioteca Historica IV 29;
Apollodorus Biblioteca II 10). It is doubtful whether Hercules understood these to
be rapes. For the murder of Iphitus he was commanded to serve Queen Omphale of
Lydia who dressed him in woman's clothes and made him do woman's work. Nevertheless
she had children by him (Diodorus Siculus IV 31). For Samson and Delilah, cf.
Judges 16.
6. Plato Republic V 451D-452B, 457A.
7. Cf. note 21 below.
8. Plutarch Lycurgus XIV.
9. Minerva threw away the flute because it distorted her face. Ovid Fasti VI 703.
10. Fenelon, Education des Filles, chap. 5. Fenelon's book is the parallel in the
girl's education to Locke's in the boy's education. Fenelon's didactic novel, Tele-
machus, is Sophie's Robinson Crusoe; cf. note 32 below.
11. Rousseau probably refers to Iliad XIV 153-223.
12. Clement of Alexandria Pedagogue II xii 125.
13. A famous Parisian dressmaker.
14. In French toilette. Great ladies in the last reigns of the French monarchy
made a ceremony out of dressing—akin to the king's levee—and received callers,
particularly gentlemen, while performing it. The toilette was an integral part of
the elaborate conventions governing coquetry in the ancien regime.
15. Matthew 6:7. This is the part of the Sermon on the Mount introducing the
Lord's Prayer.
16. Solomon Gessner, The Death of Abel, published in German in 1758. Gessner was
a German Swiss much admired by men such as Lessing and Goethe as well as by
Rousseau. The poem is an epic, not unlike Paradise Lost in character, and presents
a very gentle reading of the biblical account of the first death.
17. Tasso Jerusalem Delivered IV 87: "Woman uses every art in order to catch
[492]
NOTES
a new lover in her web. Neither with all men nor always with each one does she keep
the same aspect, but she changes attitudes and visage according to the time."
18. Virgil Eclogues III 64-72.
19. Cf. Derniere Response, O.C. Ill, pp. 93-94.
20. "When a woman has given up her chastity, she refuses nothing else." Tacitus
Annals IV 3.
21. Ninon de Lenclos (1615-1705) was a leading lady of Parisian society, loose in
love and frank and generous in friendships. Saint-Evremond called her an honnete
homme, a decent man, a gentleman. She tried to liberate herself from the
constraints of her condition. Involved with many of the great literary and
political figures of her time, she protected the young Voltaire and was championed
by him.
22. "Who eats and wipes her mouth and says: 'I have not done evil.'"
23. Rousseau refers particularly to Plutarch's Lycurgus XIV-XV for Sparta and
Tacitus Germania 7-8, 18 for Germany. The Roman stories can be found in Livy Roman
History: the rape of Lucretia and consequent fall of the Tarquin monarchy,
I 58-60; the suggestion of Licinius' wife that led to his agitation for plebeian
admission to consular rank, VI 34; the lust of Appius Claudius for Virginia and his
downfall, III 44-48; the embassy of Veturia and Volumnia to the rebel Coriolanus,
II 40.
24. Paladins are the twelve peers or famous warriors of Charlemagne's court, of
whom the Count Palatine was foremost. By extension, any hero of a medieval romance
is a paladin.
25. Cf. p. 349 and note 92 above.
26. "She who does not do something because it is forbidden, does it." Ovid Amores
III iv 4; cf. Montaigne Essays II 16.
27. In an earlier draft Rousseau had added this sentence here: "Show them the
qualities that he ought to honor in them, for what reasons they can deserve his
esteem and solidify his attachment. Lead them to virtue by means of amour-propre."
28. Plutarch Lycurgus XIV.
29. I cannot find this story in Brantome (cf. note 3 above). Matteo Bandello
(1480-1562) tells, in his Novelle (III 17), the story of Madonna Zilia who made a
similar demand on a lover. Given the enormous popularity of Bandello and the number
of writers who used his stories (e.g., Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet), the tale
Rousseau tells here probably goes back in one way or another to Bandello.
30. "The terrible anger of the son of Peleus who does not know how to yield."
Horace Odes I vi 5-6.
31. This epithet of the beautiful, seductive Apollo was used proverbially in
French to describe a clever, fast talker.
32. Cf. note 10 above. This modern epic should be consulted in any careful
reading of Book V. Telemachus is the hero with whom Sophie is in love and with whom
she identifies Emile. She, unlike Emile, is given a literary basis for her taste.
Telemachus has a tutor, Mentor, who is the parallel to Jean-Jacques. Just as
Telemachus is Sophie's guide in love, it becomes Emile's guidebook in his travels,
hence in politics. Fenelon wrote Telemachus for the instruction of Louis XIV's
grandson and heir-apparent, the Due de Bourgogne, whose tutor Fenelon was.
33. Telemachus, Book VI.
34. "You ask Galla, why I do not want to marry you? You are eloquent." Martial
Epigrams XI 19.
35. Francois Barreme (1638-1703) was a French arithmetician who published a
series of accounting handbooks.
36. Cf. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, note x.
37. Daubenton (1716-1800) was a collaborator of Buffon in the preparation of his
treatise on natural history.
38. Fenelon Telemachus VI; cf. p. 404 and note 33 above.
39. Fenelon Telemachus XV-XVI.
40. "She does not show it, although she rejoices in her heart." Tasso Jerusalem
Delivered IV 33.
41. The French word is roman, most ordinarily translated by novel. Rousseau's La
Nouvelle Heloise is a roman. The first novels were stories of love and chivalry,
hence the identity of romance and novel.
42. Cf. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, O.C. Ill, p. 133; Masters, ed.,
The Discourses, pp. 103-104.
43. Homer Odyssey VII 114-132.
44. Odyssey VI, beginning, esp. 273-289.
45. Francesco Albani (1578-1660), a Bolognese painter noted for his painting of
mythological subjects and called "the painter of the Graces."
46. In the place of this paragraph Rousseau originally wrote: "The imaginary
history of my young lovers ought not to make me forget the aim of my book. Let me
be permitted a short digression on jealousy which will not take me far from them."
[493]
NOTES
47. O.C. Ill, pp. 157-160, 168-169; Masters, ed., The Discourses, pp. 134-137.
146-147. Cf. Lucretius On the Nature of Things IV 1030-1287.
48. Cf. note 5 above.
49. Hero and Leander were lovers famous in antiquity, best known to us by the
poem of Musaeus (sixth century a.d.). Leander of Abydos was in love with Hero, a
priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos, whose parents were opposed to the marriage. Every
night he swam the Hellespont to meet her clandestinely—following a light she set
out by the shore. One night the wind blew out the lamp and Leander drowned. When
Hero found his body, she drowned herself.
50. Vergil Aeneid V 286-361.
51. Atalanta would only marry a man who could vanquish her in running. Melanion
won her hand by trickery in a race. She killed all suitors who failed in such
contests. Ovid Metamorphoses X 568.
52. Cf. p. 360-361 and note 5 above.
53. Homer Odyssey X 274-399. This story is the theme of the frontispiece of Book
V and also of the text.
54. Cf. Plato Republic III 387, and X 603 ff.
55. Cf. p. 404 and note 33 and p. 431 above.
56. The Spectator was a periodical, written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
during 1711 and 1712, devoted to commentary on the life and literature of the
times. It was enormously influential, and the entire collection has been available
continuously in book form. There was already a French translation in 1714, and it
was one of the young Rousseau's favorite books.
57. Montesquieu Persian Letters 30.
58. Raymond Lull, a Spaniard (1235-1315), wrote a treatise on logic entitled Ars
Magna (The Great Art) which claimed to reduce all the learning of all the sciences
to a few basic formulae. He hoped to convert the infidels with his art. Descartes
said ". . . the art of Lull [is better fitted] for speaking about the things one
does not know than for learning them" (Discourse on Method II). Paul Lucas (1664-
1737) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) were travelers who wrote accounts of
their voyages.
59. Rousseau, in response to Mme. de la Tour who asked to whom he referred here,
on September 27, 1762, wrote that, "I meant M. de Gisors, of course. I did not
believe it possible to mistake my reference. We do not have the good fortune to
live in an age when this kind of praise can be given to many young people" (M. R.
A. Leigh, ed., Correspondence complete de J. J. Rousseau [Geneva: Publications de
l'lnstitut et Musee Voltaire, 1971] vol. XIII, p. 122). The Comte de Gisors (1732-
1758) was an exceptionally virtuous youth and intrepid soldier who commanded a
regiment at seventeen and died at twenty-six, leading his troops during the Seven
Years War. Gisors is probably the lad referred to in the last two paragraphs of
Book II. Rousseau, the foreigner, makes up for the neglect Gisors suffers in
France.
60. I Kings 21:1-16.
61. For the following passage the Social Contract should be consulted. The
account of politics given to Emile closely follows that of the Social Contract with
some notable omissions (particularly the legislator and the civil religion, Social
Contract II 7 and IV 8).
62. Genesis 10:8-9.
63. Solon abolished debts prior to giving his laws; whereas Lycurgus, as part of
the establishment of a new polity, took over all the property of all the Spartans
and redistributed it equally to all. Solon's decree discriminated against the rich;
Lycurgus' measure was general. Cf. Plutarch Lycurgus VII-X and Solon XV-XVI.
64. "Continuous proportion" is a French mathematical expression for a proportion
in which the consequent of the first ratio is the same as the antecedent of the
second, as in A:B = B:C. In this case the proportion would be So (sovereign): g
(government) = g: Su (subject). The equation formulated in the second sentence is,
since So/g = g/Su, then g2 = So X Su.
65. The mathematical formulation here is obscure. What Rousseau means by simple
and doubled ratios is difficult to determine and to relate to usage in French
mathematical language. The example of a "doubled ratio" seems to be So Su/g2 which
is derived from the equation g2 = So X Su established on the preceding page. It in
turn was derived by cross multiplying So/g = g/Su, which apparently are simple
ratios. This doubled ratio expresses the relation between government and citizens
considered under their double aspect of members of the sovereign and subjects.
Since Su (the people, considered as the individual subject and hence always as
unity) is fixed, an increase or decrease in SoSu is necessarily an increase or
decrease in So, and hence in the value of the simple ratio So/g, But So/g = g/Su,
so when the simple ratio varies, the value of g must vary accordingly. In this way
Rousseau constructs his demonstration that government must vary as the sovereign
varies. The sequel shows that an increase in the sovereign (an increase in the
[494]
NOTES
number of citizens) necessitating an increase in the government (an increase in its
intensity or force) actually means a decrease in the number of magistrates.
66. By analogy to esprit de corps, which is difficult to translate but easy to
understand.
_„ „■.,
67. In 307-308 a.d. there were six Roman emperors at the same time. Cl. uiODon
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire XIV.
68. "In which it is neither permitted to be prepared in war nor to be secure in
peace." Seneca De tranquillitate animi I 1.
69. Rousseau edited the Abbe de Saint Pierre's Extrait du Projet de Paix
Perpetuelle (published in 1761) and wrote a critique of it Uugement sur le Projet
de Paix Perpetuelle) which appeared posthumously. For Rousseau's opinions on the
Abbe's thought cf. Confessions, O.C. I, IX, pp. 422-424; Everyman s II, pp. 72-75-
This project provided the inspiration for Kant's Perpetual Peace. Cf. p. 67 and
note 28 above.
... . .
70 The misfortunes of Idomeneus (his sacrifice of his son, and his expulsion from
Crete) are recounted in Telemachus, Book V. Salente is the new city over which
Idomeneus rules after his expulsion from Crete. Telemachus arrives there in Book IX
The loyalty of Philocles, a true friend of Idomeneus, and the perfidy of
Protesilaus, a false friend, are recounted in Books XIII-XIV. The attack of
Adrastus upon the allied forces whom Telemachus aids is described m XVI-XVII, XX.
Rousseau says in Confessions XII, O.C. I, p. 593; Everyman's II, p. 233, that he
intended that Frederick II of Prussia be recognized under his description of
^Adrastus. He thereby makes clear that Telemachus is indeed intended to make the
"invidious comparisons" he mentions in the next sentence.
71 The early manuscripts had the following notes: "I know only one exception to
this rule. It is China. The author of the Spirit of the Laws excepted it too." Cf.
Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws VIII 21.
72. Cf. Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws XXIII 21.
73. Cf. p. 31 and Preface, note 2.
74. "These are my wishes: a piece of land of moderate size. Horace Satires II 6.
This line is also the epigraph of Book VI of the Confessions.
[495]
Index
Achilles, 12, 25, 26, 36, 47, 55, 141, 257, 396, 4827114
Aemilius Paulus, 195, 481m
Alexander, 110-111, 163, 241, 243, 322, 347
Amour de soi, 4,10, 4831117. See also Self-love
Amour-propre, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 67, 68, 92, 115, 208, 214, 215, 221,
235, 243, 244, 247, 248, 251, 252, 259, 264, 265, 277, 296, 331, 358, 422, 430, 436
4831117. See also Pride; Vanity
Ancients, the 42, 57, 19971, 239, 240, 282, 321, 322, 342-43, 387, 452, 453, 47i
Anger, n, 12, 13, 66, 87, 96, ioo, 122, 211, 212, 226, 288, 319, 426, 440, 442,
447, 481712
Aristotle, 20, 163, 184, 487
Arts, the, 7, 19, 23, 45, 184-92, 195-203, 231
Astronomy, 8, 15, 167-72, 180-81
Atheism (atheists), 263, 269, 294, 31272, 314-15
Athenians, 84, 119, 25871, 31271
Augustus, 4971, 242-43, 359, 468
Bayle, Pierre, 31271
Bible, 6, 7, 284, 308, 354, 360, 389. See
also Gospel; Scriptures Boileau, Nicolas, 176, 245 Books, 7, 116, 159, 184-85, 241,
264, 302-
4, 306-7, 341, 342, 343, 450-51, 452 Bossuet, Bishop, 302 Bourgeois, 4-6, 22, 24,
26, 40, 57, 346,
482716 Brutus, 282 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc de, 4371,
6on, 13477, 184, 21571
Caesar, 106, 239, 241, 287, 322
Carthaginians, 40, 453
Cato the Censor, 4971
Cato the Younger, 106, 243, 287
Chardin, Sir John, 127-28, 31277
Chiron, 36, 141
Christianity (Christians), 5, 14, 26, 257,
258, 260, 294, 29671, 29971, 303, 304,
305, 306, 31277, 374 Cicero, 42, 109, 243, 343, 408 Circe, 36, 439 Citizen, 5,
28, 39-40, 195, 198, 33777,
363, 466, 473, 482776 Civil man, 39-40, 42-43 Civil society, 3, 5, 9, 25, 27, 190,
249, 460,
466 Clarke, Samuel, 269 Climate, 52, 128, 215
Commiseration. See Compassion
Comparison (of persons), 17-18, 57, 161, 184, 213, 214, 226, 228, 233, 235, 243
Compassion, 17-20, 23, 87, 220, 221-27, 229, 231, 235, 236, 237-45, 250-53, 262,
265, 288, 336
Competition, 11, 137, 141-43, 184, 214, 269, 431, 437
Condillac, 107, 286, 487774
Conscience, 67, 8i, 91, 100, 235, 264, 267, 269, 275, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284,
286, 289, 290, 291, 294, 295, 297, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 331, 381-83, 396, 444,
445, 459, 460, 473.
Crying. See Tears
Darius, 322
Death, 42, 53, 54, 55, 78-79, 82, in, 131, 162, 208, 222, 226, 256, 281, 292,
31277, 379, 446; fear of, 5, 9-10, 12, 15, 19, 54, 55, 82, 83, 282, 290, 446
Denaturing, 22, 26, 40, 44, 45, 337
Dependence, 3, 8, n, 66, 84, 85, 205, 208, 213, 233, 244, 472
Descartes, 267, 273, 483712, 487774
Diderot, 10577
Doctors, 45, 54-56, 82, 122, 131, 231, 459. See also Medicine
Duclos, Charles, 338
Duty (duties), 50, 51, 52-53, 55, 103, 104, 116, 160, 198, 213, 267, 268, 292, 296,
303, 323, 324, 334; Christianity and marital, 374; of fathers, 48-49, 448; humanity
as men's first, 79; vs. inclination, 3, 7, 17, 24, 25-27, 40, 444, 446; of mothers,
44-47, 56, 59; and natural religion, 311-13, 380; reason, passion, and 18; rights
precede, 14, 97, 250; and self-interest, 5; of women, 361, 381-83, 386-93, 395,
450; working as social man's, 195. See also Morality
Education, 9, 10, 34-35, 38-39, 40-41, 41-42, 52, 53, 61, 94, 105, 127, 162, 171,
184, 194, 212, 233, 254, 363-77, 406,415-16
Egypt, Egyptians, 41, 127, 451
Emulation, 92, 130, 144, 214, 226
England (the English), 6077, 153, 200, 337, 367, 374, 451, 452, 468, 469
Envy, 19, 92, 221, 223, 229, 235, 249, 284, 345
Equality, 3, 5, 14, 19, 20, 25, 41, 160, 189, 236, 358, 362, 371, 407. See also
Inequality
Eucharis, 404, 414, 450
Editorial note: 71 indicates a note of Rousseau's; n followed by a number indicates
a note of the translator's.
[497]
INDEX
Euripides, 258
Europe (Europeans), 44-45, 52, 128, 14m, 204, 303, 342, 451, 453
Fables, 19-20, 112-116, 247-49
Family, 16, 22-24, 24-25, 27, 46, 49, 361, 362-63, 374, 388, 406, 479
Fanaticism, 6, 259, 291, 308, 31m, 313, 378, 381
Fatherland, 5, 40, 347, 363, 448, 466, 473, 474
Fathers, 37n, 46, 48-50, 53, 186-87, 200
Favorinus, 81
Fear, 63-64, 69, 77-78, 92, 159; of darkness, 63, 134-38, 148. See also Death, fear
of
Fenelon, 369, 404
Fontenelle, 343
Food, 8, 13-14, 20, 98-99, in, 137, 141-43, 146, 150-56, 165, 180-81, 182-83, 187,
190-92, 345-46, 368-71, 394-95. 412-13, 431. See also Gluttony; Vegetarianism
Foresight, 3771, 79-80, 82-83, 108, 118, 119, 123, 159, 162, 175, 177, 178, 188,
196, 226, 247, 249, 282, 326-27, 410-11, 418
Fortune, 41-42, 194, 195, 196, 224, 249, 262, 264, 446
France (the French), 52, 72, 152, 200, 317, 328, 337", 387, 390-91, 451, 452, 453,
468, 469
Freedom, 3, 5, 12, 14, 25, 44, 63, 68, 83, 84, 88-89, 93> 94, 100, 101, 120, 160,
161, 162, 177, 185, 195, 197, 208, 212, 233, 234, 280, 281, 284, 285, 292, 294,
315. 336, 345. 354. 359. 369, 370, 43L 444-45. 459. 461, 471, 472, 473
Friendship, 215, 220, 230, 23371, 234, 287, 316, 323, 332, 349, 419
General will, 27, 85, 460-66, 473 Geneva, Genevans, 125, 139, 473 Geography, 109-
10, 112, 167-71 Geometry, 108, 145-46, 167, 207 Germans, 317, 390, 453 Gluttony,
152, 345, 394, 395. See also
Food God, 20, 26, 37,43, 67, 79, ioon, 103,106, 123, 151, 169, 212, 221, 231, 255-
59, 262, 263, 268, 269, 273-86, 292-314, 316, 323, 324, 359, 377-81, 412, 426, 442,
444, 447, 459. See also Religion
Gospel, 23571, 305, 307, 308, 3IO, 31277.
See also Bible; Scriptures Government, 321-22, 448, 455, 457, 458,
465-66, 468, 469, 471, 473. See also
Politics Governor, the, 49-50, 51-52, 52-53, 57,
61, 95- See also Preceptor, the Greece (the Greeks), 84, 308, 360, 366,
453 Grotius, 458, 467
Habit, 39, 45,46, 47, 60, 61-62, 63-64, 65, 68, 69, 93, 105, 118, 127, 134", 135,
138, 151, 160, 213, 214, 219, 225, 228,
230, 286, 370, 431-32 Happiness, 3, 39, 77-78, 79-80, 80-82, 85,
112, 162, 185, 194, 221, 227, 229, 266,
284, 292, 293, 294, 314, 354, 381, 400,
419, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447, 457, 475-
76 Hearing, 64, 132, 138, 148, 152. See also
Senses Hercules, 137, 360, 431, 438 Hermes, 36, 184
Herodotus, 128, 156, 239, 453, 454 History, 3, 17, 416; study of, 19, 110-112,
156, 207, 237-43, 340, 342, 425 Hobbes, 5, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24,
67, 87, 458, 483712, 4837114, 4837717, ' 4847720, 487774 Homer, 6, 153, 413, 420,
453 Horace, 354, 396, 472
Ignorance, 15, 54, 120, 167,171, 173, 182, 204, 206, 207, 219, 268, 269, 313
Imagination, 8, 9, 21, 152, 158, 256, 259, 322, 323, 393, 405; and compassion, 17-
18, 221-25, 231; and fear of the dark, 134-35, 137; and fear of death, 9, 82; and
religion, 296, 259, 263, 268; sex, love, and, 16, 22, 215, 217-20, 230, 316, 318,
320, 325, 329, 333, 391, 447; source of misery, 7, 80-81
Inequality, 143, 202, 235, 315, 340, 348, 361, 364, 406. See also Equality
Injustice, 13, 82, 87, 234, 260, 263, 283, 285, 288, 292, 304, 305, 306, 314, 396;
sentiment of, 66, 99. See also Justice
Intolerance, 257, 295, 306, 309, 310, 313, 38i,457
Jealousy, 11, 92, 120, 130, 144, 184, 213, 214, 229, 285, 429-31
Jesus Christ, 29977, 304, 305, 307-8, 378, 392, 4847735
Jews, 256, 296, 303, 304, 30477, 31277, 360
Jupiter, 61, 257, 288
Justice, 227,235, 236, 25077, 253, 267, 282, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 292, 294,
307, 309; sentiment of, 66, 97, 279. See also 309: sentiment of, 66, 97, 279. See
also Injustice
Labor, 13, 98-99; division of, 7, 8, 19, 23, 185, 193 (See also Arts, the); manual,
56, 139, 195, 201, 202
La Fontaine, 112-16, 248
Lais, 349, 391
Lambercier, M., 135, 136
Language, 65, 68, 70-74, 428; of the passions, 148-49, 251; of signs (see Rhetoric)
Languages, study of, 108-9, 342, 344. 47i
Law(s) of nature, 47, 129, 177, 192, 193, 324, 360, 364, 387. 429, 43°. 472, 473,
478
L'Enclos, Mademoiselle de, 386, 409
[498]
INDEX
Literature, 341, 342, 343-44, 409
Livy, 239
Locke, 5, 13, 15, 18, 25, 33, 55, 89, 90, 103, 117, 126, 128, 197, 255, 279, 357,
481114, 4847121, 48sn37, 4857147, 487714
London, 454, 468
Love, 17, 20-27, 45-46, 49, 93, 169, 203, 213, 214, 215, 220, 221, 222, 228, 230,
233. 234, 235, 278, 287, 320, 324-29, 331, 335, 337, 339, 341, 344, 349, 354-55,
357, 358, 360, 363, 384-89, 391, 392-93, 397-98, 399-402, 402-5, 415-16, 417-18,
419, 424, 427-28, 429-31, 432-33, 438-39, 443-50, 470-7I, 475-80. See also Sex
Lycurgus, 40, 462
Lying, roi-3, 12471, 376, 385
Machiavelli, 5, 14, 239
Magician-Socrates, the, 175
Marcel (dancing-master), 139, 337
Marriage, 24, 267, 317, 324, 374, 399-402, 406-10, 447-48, 475-80
Medicine, 54-56, 82,111-12,157, 4827124, 483712. See also Doctors
Mentor, 414, 424, 435, 467
Miracles, 293, 297, 298, 299, 301
Moderns, the, 126, 239, 342-43
Mohammed, 258, 303-4
Montaigne, 126, 131, 207, 240, 289, 317, 335
Montesquieu, 20, 451, 458, 468, 4857156
Morality, 15, 78, 85, 89, 99, 101, no, 116, 160, 167, 178, 185, 190, 207, 214, 232,
248-49, 281, 289, 307-8, 310-n, 396-97, 468, 473; as harming no one, vs. atheism
and philosophy, 263,292,31271, 314-15; begins with mothers, 46, 49; conscience,
reason, and, 235, 279; goes with esteem for women, 390-91; as harming no one, 14,
15, 104-5; and human nature, 287; and natural religion, 295, 381; none before age
of reason; 67, 90, 92; the problem of, 25-27. See also Duty
Moses, 299, 304, 30877
Mothers, 33, 37, 44-47, 48, 49, 56, 59- See also Women
Natural law, 235, 25077, 292, 295, 317 Natural man, 3, 5, 6, 14, 39-40, 41, 48,
62, 177, 205, 253, 255, 260 Nature, 22, 31, 37, 55, 62, 80, 92, 96, 131,
205, 278, 34r, 345, 405, 406, 429-30,
445, 472, 4827124; beauties of, 144,158, 168-69, 266; and the goal of education,
38-39; meaning of, 39; and morality, 287; vs. opinion, 167, 241, 330; and the
passions, 48,212; and sex, 214-16,219-20, 231, 267, 317, 349-50, 360; and taste,
341, 345-46
Necessity, 10, n, 12, 13, 83, 91, 92, 96, 160, 167, 177, 187, 196, 203, 208, 443,
446, 458, 472 Newton, Sir Isaac, 127, 273
Nurse(s), 42, 44-47, 48, 56-57, 61, 65,
69, 70 Nursing, mothers and, 44-47
Orientals, 199, 224, 347 Orpheus, 36, 294 Ovid, 74, 392
Paris, Parisians, 14m, 147, 183, 188, 202, 260, 328, 330, 333, 342, 346, 350, 355,
362, 389, 410, 411, 451, 454, 468, 469, 473
Pascal, 31271
Passions, 9, ri, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23, 48, 54, 57, 67, 92, 114, 165, 167, 172,
183, 187, 202, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 219,
220, 223, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231,
235, 236, 237, 241, 243, 244, 251, 253, 259, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286,
287, 292, 293, 312, 316, 321, 325, 327,
340, 359, 402, 416, 442, 444, 445, 446,
472 Peasants, 57, 71-74, 92, 95, 118, 125,
12871, 156, 161, 202, 315, 351, 352 Persia, Persians, 51-52, 127, 128, 130,
303, 31277, 451, 453 Philip (physician to Alexander), no, 183 Philosophy, 5-6, 21,
26, 33, 45, 67, 70,
112, 115, 125, 135, 166, 167, 177, 215,
237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 253, 255,
269, 274, 278, 279, 286, 289, 290, 31271,
313, 340, 342, 359, 383, 386, 387, 422-
23, 425, 451, 454 Philosophers, 8, 19, 22, 23, 28, 39, 43, 55,
62, 107-110, 13471, 167, 177, 184, 205,
221, 225, 226, 243, 254, 258, 266, 268, 269, 279, 285, 286, 289, 300, 307, 312,
313, 314, 315, 412
Physics, 125, 175-77, 425, 426
Pity. See Compassion
Plato, 6, 8-9, ro, 12, 21, 25, 40, X07, 307,
344, 362-63, 412, 451, 454, 483712, 4847118, 487714, 4887127, 48971x1. Works:
Republic, 4, 12, 28, 40, 307, 362-63, 4847118, 4887727, 4897111; Symposium, 21, 344
Plutarch, 6, 19, 4971, 15171, 154, 240, 241,
25871, 259, 283, 30271, 481m Poetry, 6, 9, 21-23, 55, "3,169, 342, 344,
458. See also Robinson Crusoe. Politics, 27, 189, 196, 197, 235, 448, 452,
458-67 Polybius, 152, 239 Preceptor, the 42, 48-50, 51-52, 57- See
also Governor, the Pride, 6, 11, 13, 48, 62, 67, 81, 166, 167,
175, 201, 206, 215, 221, 229, 245, 262,
265, 268, 280, 295, 306, 313, 337, 339,
345, 363, 391, 402, 426, 428, 439, 446, 452. See also Amour-propre; Vanity
Property, 13, 14, 98-99, 104, 160, 189, 195, 249, 456-57, 461, 472
Pxophecies, 298, 29971, 301
Pupil, the, 50-51; choice of, 52-56; judging the genius or character of, 52, 94,
100, 106-7, 192, 198-99
[499]
INDEX
Pythagoras, 5871, 154, 236, 39371, 412, 454, 481m
Racine, 176, 245
Reason, 64, 138, 179, 206, 253, 274, 314, 315. 327, 383; childhood the sleep of,
89, 93, 107; children have a kind of, 108,162; and fear of darkness, 134-35; and
fear of death, 82; and love, 214; morality, conscience, and, 235, 290, 291, 294,
473; no morality before the age of, 67, 89; vs. passions, 279, 359; and religion,
255, 257-58, 260, 277, 284, 285, 286, 295, 297, 30c—301, 307, 308, 309, 313;
sensual vs. intellectual, 125; vs. sentiment, 272, 280; using, with children, 87,
89-91, 94, 95-96, 170; using, with youths, 319, 321-23, 325
Regulus, 40, 289
Religion, 7, 9, 12, 36, 103, 153", 169, 254, 256, 257, 260, 263, 288-89, 296, 297,
308, 312, 313, 321, 377-8i, 396-97, 426, 457; natural, 294, 295, 296, 299, 300,313
Revelation, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 30277, 303, 306, 307
Rhetoric, 21, 251, 319, 321-23, 342
Rights. See Duty; Property; Politics
Right(s) of nature, 235, 317, 350, 391, 400
Robinson Crusoe, 7, 8, 9, 19, 23, 27, 184-88, 198
Rome (Romans), 40, 4971, 107, 136, 195, 246, 250, 288, 31271, 322, 337, 366, 390,
391, 453, 454, 463, 466, 474
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: incidents from his life, 125, 135-36, 260-313, 344-54.
Works: Confessions, 29; Dialogues, 29; Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 15, 23,
29; Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 3, 7, 18, 29, 258, 429; Dreams of a
Solitary Walker, 28, 29; Letter to M. d'Alembert, 12877; Nouvelle Heloise, 29, 337;
Social Contract, 27, 28, 29, 85, 462
Saint-Pierre, Abbe de, 67, 198, 466, 46771,
468 Savage(s), 7, 23, 82, 118, 12877, 131, 151,
153, 156, 157, 167, 185, 202, 204, 205,
229, 243, 255, 256, 258, 315, 333, 454 Savoyard Vicar, Profession of Faith of
the, 20, 67, 266-313, 4917763 Science(s), 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 22, 23, 25,
36, 45, 48, 49, 51, 54, 62, 101, 108, III,
112, 117, 126, 167, 168, 171, 172, 176-
77, 180, 184, 192, 201, 207, 348, 386-
87, 426 Scriptures, 294, 29977, 307. See also Bible;
Gospel Self-love, 11, 92, 213, 214, 215, 235, 253,
278, 282, 290, 314, 316, 4837117 Seneca, 31, 107, 466, 4847119 Sensations, 39, 61,
62, 64-65, 74, 89, 107,
108, m, 140, 158, 168, 203, 205, 206, 270, 271, 27971
Senses, 9, 15, 42, 39, 64, 70, 94, 125, 132-40, 143, 146, 152, 168, 169, 170, 176,
177, 200, 203, 205, 215, 222, 231, 232, 255, 270, 278, 280, 283, 284, 286, 292,
320, 325, 326, 329, 333. See also Hearing; Sight; Smell; Taste; Touch
Sentiment of existence, 42, 61, 270
Sex, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25-27, 152, 159, 165, 185, 192, 198, 211-12, 214,
215-20, 227, 228, 230-33, 243, 245, 246, 263, 265, 267, 316-21, 323-335, 337, 341,
348, 349-50, 354-55, 357, 360, 397, 406, 428, 429-30, 443. See also Love
Sexes, the, 341; differences between, 23-25, 211, 357-63; interdependence of 360,
364, 377, 476
Sight, 64, 132, 138, 140, 143, 148, 152, 156, 206. See also Sense
Smell, 6471, 132, 156-57. See also Sense
Society, 7, 22, 23, 24, 27, 55, 84, 97, 10577, 116, 119, 178, 185, 187, 188, 189,
193, 195, 202, 205, 208, 214, 218, 227-29,
235, 236, 237, 249, 255, 259, 31277, 327-
33, 335-39, 340-54, 380, 387-89, 402-3 Social Contract, 14, 460-66, 473 Socrates,
10, 15, 179, 243, 289, 307,
4847718, 4847134, 4847135, 4857736. See
also Magician-Socrates, the Solitary, 28, 10577, no, 185, 193, 195, 327,
333, 348 Solon, 462 Sparta (Spartans), 22, 24, 26, 39, 40, 119,
153, 189, 308, 343, 366, 390, 393, 466 Spectator, The, 450 State of nature, 25, 85,
101, 151, 193, 195,
205, 236, 455, 461 Stoics, 226, 226717, 30271 Strength, 47, 68, 78, 81, 82, 84,
118, 131,
161, 165, 166, 168, 192, 200, 229, 444,
445 Sublimation, 15-16, 17, 21 Suetonius, 4971, 240 Suffering, 19, 42, 47, 48, 54,
55, 77-78,
80, 82, 86-87, 131, 221, 222, 281, 445 Superstition, 3, 10, n-12, 134, 255
Swaddling, 42-44, 60-61, 68
Tacitus, 239, 24077, 38677, 453
Taste (preference), 23, 151, 167, 169,
172, 192, 198, 201, 202, 228, 338, 339,
340-44, 344-54, 359, 361, 363, 367, 375 Taste (sensation), 132, 151-56, 157. See
also Senses Tears, io-n, 48, 65-66, 68-69, 77-78, 86 Telemachus, 404, 405, 410,
414, 415, 424.
467 Telemachus, 410, 450, 467 Theater, 344 Thetis, 36, 47 Thucydides, 239 Touch,
64, 133-40, 143, 148, 152, 156.
206. See also Senses Trade, importance of learning a, 195-203 Travel, 411-13, 450-
71, 473
[500]
INDEX
Turenne, M. de, 241 Venetians, Venice,
126, 32211
Turks, 224, 303, 304. 306, 313 Virgil, 109, 224, 344
Ulysses, 36, 137, 212, 326, 439
Utility, 7, 20, 97, 108, 112, 116, 131, 166,
167, 177, 178-80, 183, 184, 185, 186,
187, 197, 198, 207, 213, 368
Vanity, 6, 8, 11, 19, 20, 90, 92, 115, 120. 130, 132, 152, 159-60, 173-75, 178,
184, 197, 201, 204, 215, 221, 226, 228, 229, 245, 251, 265, 292, 296, 331, 338,
340, 341, 345, 348, 354, 363, 372, 388, 430, 452. See also Amour-propre; Pride
Vegetarianism, s6re, 57-58, 153-55, 4827124
Weakness, 47, 65, 66, 67, 68, 81, 84-85, 88, 123, 165, 168, 221, 444
Women, 24-25, 37", 44-45, 46, 48, 63, 211, 341, 409, 417-18, 451; differences
between men and, 357-63; duties of, 381-93; early education of, 363-77; as the
natural judges of men, 390-91; religion of, 377-81, 396-97; the study appropriate
to, 386-87. See also Mothers
Xenophon, 51, 239, 343 Xerxes, 12
[501]